


Slick

by intodusk



Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Homophobia, Trans Female Character, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2019-09-19 13:53:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 35,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17002908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intodusk/pseuds/intodusk
Summary: When the city she calls home starts to descend into chaos, Taylor Hebert finds herself becoming fuel for the flames.





	1. 1.1 Crude

Class ended in five minutes and all I could think was,  _an hour isn’t long enough for concert band._  
  
It took a considerable amount of time just to set up all the chairs, stands and instruments, even for a group as meager and underfunded as ours. Another chunk was lost getting everyone to stop talking, then more for tuning, both individually and then as a whole. More still had to be allotted at the end to deconstructing everything, making room for the choir class that followed us. In the end, we only ever used half the period to actually  _play music_ , and that wasn’t enough to fix all the big mistakes, let alone fine-tune any details.  
  
Not that even the whole period’s worth would be enough for me. If I had my way I’d replace half my classes with more of this, but I’d settle for subsuming just my next period.  
  
Still, it was wonderful while it lasted. Just me, my flute, and the rest of the band, twirling and jumping through chord progressions, suspended on sound. Something I could still be proud of. A precious, precious distraction.  
  
Mr. Hoffman signaled to cut just before the transition from third to fourth movement. “Okay,” he said, voice reedy and beleaguered, “we’ll stop here. Morgan, Will? Those long notes are forte, but they’re not fortissimo. Remember that. Trumpets, work on your entrance at measure 47. That sixteenth-rest matters; you’re supposed to be responding to the French horns. Taylor?”  
  
I paused in dissembling my flute and looked up.  
  
“Not bad. Focus on refining that solo section.”  
  
I savored those first two words like ambrosia.  
  
He continued to talk over the sounds of cases being shut and chairs getting stacked against the wall. “Every one of you should be taking this chart home with you tonight. The showcase may not be until winter, but we’ve got performances leading up to that, too. I want this one ready by open house.”  
  
Charlotte was waiting for me by the door, clarinet case in hand to match my flute’s, and together we dove into the river of students in the hall. The music room had instrument cubbies, but this was Winslow, so anything small enough to steal was better off in a locker. It still wouldn’t be safe there overnight, not if anyone knew it was there, but it’d keep people out until I could take it home.  
  
We melded into the throngs, navigating the hall’s currents. There were spots everyone knew to keep their distance from, lockers or corners where members of the Bay’s two main gangs staked their claim, boasting their exploits to each other and harassing non-members that got close enough to be noticed. Some avoided the tags the same way, though that was a paranoia reserved for the freshmen or the otherwise meek and naive. I was a junior now; the tags themselves were just paint.  
  
“So,” Charlotte began, “how’d it go? With the…”  
  
The eyeliner. I frowned. “Not great. I looked like a goth raccoon. I don’t think it’s for me.”  
  
“You’ll like it better once you can get the lines even. Promise. Next time I come over and your dad’s not there I can show you, alright?”  
  
“Sure,” I mumbled, shrugging my shoulders. “And, you know, thanks. Really.”  
  
She rolled her eyes and smiled. “Of course.”  
  
Her locker was closer. She stowed her clarinet away, retrieved a textbook and a binder and shut it. “See you at sixth?”  
  
The question wasn’t rhetorical. Now that the fleeting high of being good at something had faded from me, she could tell what sort of state I was in, and if I was going to ditch I would do it now, before I had to brave the locker room. I wasn't going to, though. “Yeah. See you then.”  
  
She smiled again, this time with a sympathetic tinge, and went back the way we came, in the direction of her next class.  
  
I shoved my free hand into the pocket of my hoodie and started the other way, frustrated with myself. Charlotte meant well, and she was the best (and only) friend I’d had in years, but I hated making her worry about me. It was almost worse than it was with Dad; he didn’t know what he was supposed to be worrying about, only that I hadn’t grown into my teens the way he’d expected me to and we were past the point where Mom’s death alone could explain it. Charlotte knew a lot more than he did, so her concern probed deeper, stirred what I tried so hard to keep down and drew it into my throat.  
  
I needed it, but knowing that didn’t make it any easier.  
  
I reached my locker to find one of the biggest gang tags I'd seen yet. The outline of a wolf’s head had been drawn in gold spray paint across a few lockers, jaws poised to clamp down on the stylized red “88” that'd been there for weeks. Half of a crude triangular ear spilled over onto my door.  
  
My brow furrowed. The speculation online that the Chosen had “inducted” a new cape seemed to have held weight. They were probably nonwhite, too, if they were outright taunting the Empire over it. I wished I could enjoy seeing Nazis get taken down a peg or two, but I knew what would come of poking the bear before you shot it. At best, they’d take it out on minorities. At worst, they’d pick a fight to bolster their image and ravage some unlucky part of the city,  _and then_  they’d take it out on minorities.  
  
For a guy that gave lip service to doing right by his people Fenrir sure seemed to get them into unnecessary combat a lot. Then again, by all reports he probably did consider that “doing right” by them.  
  
My flute and the books in my bag went into my locker. As I was closing it something bumped into me from behind and shoved me forward, forcing my nose to collide painfully with the cold metal door. Wet threatened to leak from my nostrils and I clamped them shut with both hands, praying no one had seen. I whirled around to face my assaulter.  
  
Sophia Hess. Leering over her shoulder at me, eyes narrowed, flanked on her other side by Emma Barnes. She was one of the only girls in the school that about matched my height but I had a feeling she would manage to look down on me even if she were five foot nothing. Her gaze was hard to meet head-on but I didn’t dare look anywhere else, not at the floor, not at the people rubbernecking at us, and definitely not at the rest of her.  
  
The places she was slender where I was just lean.  
  
The swell of her chest where I was flat as a board.  
  
The curve in her hips where I was a narrow line.  
  
That might have been the worst part about what the two of them did to me: that even after all the rumors and belittling and veiled threats, I was still so achingly, caustically  _jealous_  of them both. I hated myself for it.  
  
Sophia’s face was hard. “Watch yourself, Hebert.”  
  
I knew what she meant. “ _Tell anyone what you know and you and your dad are dead._ ” I opened my mouth to retort, still covering my nose, but I was interrupted.  
  
“Wow Taylor,” Emma said, voice a casual, underhanded sort of scathing, “did you have a growth spurt? I could swear your shoulders have gotten even wider.” She winked, a boxer prefacing the knockout punch with a cocky flourish. “Maybe the football team will even ask you to be a linebacker this year.”  
  
They weren’t actually very broad, all things considered, and I knew that, but the fact that she would say it, knowing exactly how deep it would cut, burned me. The words I hadn’t quite formed soured in my throat, liquefied, became a bile that promised to rise and brim over the instant I broke composure. It took everything in me not to spew my reply’s remains at their backs as they walked away, Emma whispering in Sophia’s ear, probably about secrets that would ruin me if let slip.  
  
I stormed down the halls in a fugue state, swallowing down what wanted,  _needed_  to escape, barely conscious of anything other than the building pressure. It was a wonder I got to where I was going, but not a pleasant one.  
  
The door to the locker room loomed like the gates of hell, gilded in dull, flaking paint. That might have been more truth than comparison, actually; if hell was anywhere on Earth, it'd be in Winslow, and if ever there was more perfect torment than this, it was meant for a different sinner. If I strained my ears I could almost hear the devil over the demons, drawn into this liminal corner of reality to watch the show, cackling like a cartoon in anticipation of my raw suffering.  
  
I hesitated briefly, then entered, not letting my gaze wander beyond where I was walking lest I blush and add fuel to the rumors about my sexuality. I beelined for my usual stall, locked myself in, hung my backpack on the hook on the door, and turned back to the toilet just in time for the stench of the place to sink into my nose, cracking the dam that held me together.  
  
 _How do boys manage to smell so fucking bad?_  
  
All my stress and hurt and loathing gushed up my throat and into the toilet in a torrent of black liquid. I did my damnedest to stem the tide but I'd been holding too much back, the pressure needed release. When the worst of it was out I just stood there, excess dribbling down my mouth and nostrils. It was dark as pitch except where the light hit it, catching and bending on the surface in an iridescent shimmer, like an oil spill in a parking lot. For all I could tell it  _was_  oil, or at least something a lot like it: there wasn't much of a smell to it, but it was filmy, it was slick, and I knew from testing and training that it  _burned_.  
  
I raised a hand to wipe my face clean but stopped when I noticed I was missing a couple fingers. Where the tip of my ring finger and half my pinky should have been, there were only a pair of stumps, melty and dripping black.  
  
I frowned. I must've been in a worse state than I'd realized, if I was falling apart like that. It happened sometimes, when I released restraint. I was just glad it'd ended up in the bowl with the rest.  
  
Instead of wiping the wet on my face away, I reabsorbed it, feeling it replenish my mass. From the stumps grew a pair of dark and pearlescent digits that, with a bit of concentration, solidified into flesh, good as new. My power didn’t let me reshape my base form, to my immense disappointment, but it did let me recover from what would otherwise be devastating injuries; regrowing fingers was the least of my capabilities in that department. There was still some oil left on me when I was done. I opted to just absorb that, too. It wasn’t the most comfortable sensation, similar to eating when I was already full, but it didn’t hurt any.  
  
I changed out of my shapeless clothes, ignoring my bare, breastless chest, and into my shapeless gym clothes. The hoodie went back on right after, my fondest form-obscuring refuge, and the rest of my regular clothes went into my backpack. I raked through my curls, remedying the strays and tangles. They tickled at my shoulders now. I reveled in that.  
  
A knock on the stall door startled me. “Hey, uh, you good, man?”  
  
I flushed the toilet, not worrying about the fact that I’d just sent a highly flammable substance down the pipes. My oil dissolved into water once it’d been off my person long enough, quicker if I wasn’t trying to influence it. “I’m fine.” I opened the door to find a boy I'd seen maybe once or twice standing there. He’d changed into a plain white t-shirt but had yet to swap his jeans for shorts.  
  
The concern fell from his face. “Oh.”  
  
By the lockers, a guy built between stocky and chubby barked a laugh as he pulled on his shirt. “Told you. He voms in there all the time. Hey Hebert,” he jeered, “got a boyfriend you’re tryna stay skinny for?”  
  
The first boy chuckled at that. I dodged past him. Others done changing funneled into the door to the gym proper and I shuffled into the sea of bodies. I was surrounded on all sides by boys I couldn’t relate to, some busting guts with unfunny jokes, some saying despicable things about girls in our class, many in dire need of deodorant. They all saw me as a part of that whole, if a vaguely defective part, set apart by some subtle, pervasive quality of  _weird_ , but I knew who I was.  
  
I was Taylor Hebert. I was a girl, even if only one other person knew it. I had a power. It wasn’t world-class or game-changing, but it was mine. I didn’t have a team and I wasn’t planning on becoming a Ward - I would  _never_  be a Ward - but I was going to do some good with it anyways.  
  
I was going to be a heroine.


	2. 1.2 Crude

I had only ever opened up about my gender issues to two people. With Emma, I’d expected confidence and gotten stabbed in the back for it. I hadn’t been explicit about it - I didn’t even know the whole of it myself, back then - but she knew more than enough details to approximate the truth in retrospect. When I’d admitted I wanted to be like her older sister, Anne; confessing I was terrified I’d grow up bald like my dad or big like my granddad; trying on each other’s clothes “just for fun.” Either she understood and was intentionally using it against me just to tear me down, or she didn’t quite get it and was trying to “fix” me. Given she hadn’t yet blabbed about the more incriminating bits, I assumed the latter. I had yet to decide if that was better or worse.  
  
After that precedent had been set, when I’d been least trusting and most desperate, Charlotte had proven a glass of water in the desert. With her, I’d expected confusion or disgust and received support instead. My last-ditch effort had turned a friend I shared classes with and texted sometimes into someone I relied on, who didn’t always get what I was going through but tried anyways. In turn, she relied on me to deflect the attentions of Winslow’s Neo-Nazis, keep them from causing trouble for her for being Jewish. I wasn’t the most intimidating physical presence but oftentimes just having someone else around was enough, and I’d been told I could level a pretty mean glare to boot.  
  
Case in point, the pale, wiry kid in a red shirt and black jacket that’d been hovering around where we were sat on the steps in front of the school withered and scowled before heading elsewhere.  
  
“Yeesh. Where did you even learn to do that?” Charlotte asked, fiddling with the mechanical pencil in her hand.  
  
“Dad’s a beanpole in charge of gorillas, and according to him no job doesn’t have assholes. He gets a lot of use out of a good ‘don’t fuck around with me’ stare.” I pushed my glasses back up. “That’s one thing I’m glad to inherit from him.”  
  
She nodded and turned back to the worksheet. She had it spread on the cover of a textbook that was in turn perched on her lap. “Hey, what did you say for thirteen? It was the trenches, air support, and tanks, right?”  
  
I lowered my book and peered over at her sheet. “The one about the death toll at the Somme? All you need to mention are the trenches and the machine guns. How it turned the battles into a long-term deal.”  
  
“I thought the thing was that it was the first battle with tanks. The guns part was more an overall issue.” She flipped the sheet to the front, then flipped it back. “And it was already the answer to number four!”  
  
“I know. Trust me, I had Mrs. Peters for World History before this. That's just how she is. She probably didn't even make this worksheet herself.”  
  
She shook her head. “Okay, but I'm gonna talk about the tanks too.”  
  
I shrugged and turned back to Plath. “If you want, I guess. Couldn't hurt.”  
  
Students that'd stayed after school for extracurriculars were passing by us now, dissipating into the rest of the city. A thin breeze stirred bits of crushed leaves on the grass. Over the buildings the sky had taken on the slightest ruddy tinge, a promise that it'd cook into a rich, savory sunset in a couple hours. A squirrel climbed up a tree, then scurried back down to try another.  
  
I took the moment in with a breath before it could pass me by. I was trying not to take things like this for granted anymore, these little tastes of easy companionship. It'd been a fixture before, as expected as night giving way to day. Now I knew what it was like to go ravenous for it. I wanted to hold what I had close, sacred. I liked to think I was getting the hang of it.  
  
A green minivan pulled up to the sidewalk and Charlotte perked up. “Okay, Mom's here.” She tucked the worksheet between the pages of the textbook and stuffed it into her backpack. “Thanks for waiting with me, Tay. Keep working on you-know-what, alright?”  
  
I replaced my bookmark and set about putting my own things away. “Fine. I'll probably need you to show me anyways, though.”  
  
“I know you will.” She made her way to the street, tossed her backpack onto one of the van's middle seats and climbed into shotgun. The window on that side crawled down so she could half-shout, “See you later!”  
  
From the driver's seat her mom gave me a smile and a little wave.  
  
I raised my voice just enough to be heard, responded, “Bye Char, Mrs. Blum,” and watched them drive away. I slung my pack and headed a different direction, to the bus that would take me most of the way home.  
  
There were a few people already waiting at the stop when I arrived. One stood out to me, wearing a henley and beanie that were both medium grey, almost a dull metal color, but a subtle once-over cleared him as probably safe to be around. If he was Chosen, he'd have some gold on him to match the grey. I kept a little extra distance between us just to be safe and snuck a few glances as we waited, more out of indulgence than suspicion. He was even taller than me and it was easy to trace the lines of his muscles through his coat.  
  
He almost caught me looking once and I turned away, cheeks burning. I scowled as the implications of what I'd been doing bore down on me. Knowing there wasn't actually anything wrong with it didn't make the ingrained shame go away. I didn't look again.  
  
When the bus pulled in I chose a seat in the back end, settled my backpack in the adjacent seat and unzipped it to retrieve my book. I frowned, reconsidering, and put it back. I had enough on my mind without inviting Esther Greenwood’s problems into the mix. I joined my hands in my lap and watched Brockton Bay go by, letting the light jostling and the engine's grumble clear my head.  
  
Another vehicle caught my eye as it passed us. It was a PRT van, one of the newer ones that looked more like S.W.A.T. vans than they did their predecessors. Black, blocky and tough, featuring thick tires, reinforced windows, floodlights, and a hose ending in a large nozzle mounted on top. A winged shield bearing the PRT’s initials was emblazoned in stark white on the side. It was a discordant sight, to see it tracing an ostensibly passive patrol route, and not just for the visual contrast against the regular cars.  
  
Despite the fact that the overall organization was more a public relations entity than anything else, and even though the ‘R’  _literally_   _stood for_  Response, the PRT in Brockton Bay had evolved into an aggressive, active force over the last couple years. They coordinated strikes on gang hideouts and holdings, used intel from CI’s and moles to preempt dangerous cape conflicts; patrols weren't really part of their new playbook.  
  
Thing was, what they were doing here, sending vans to circle in and out of gang-occupied territories, acting like they were waiting for an excuse instead of finding one, wasn’t them settling back into a passive role. This was a bait-and-switch. They’d done the same thing when they captured Menja: sent a lone van to “patrol” an area downtown, provoked an opportunistic response from their capes, and had backup and Protectorate members close in once they were committed. The report they’d released online had been cleaned up but it hadn’t been too hard to piece together the strategy. Now, it seemed they were fishing for Chosen capes. They wouldn’t get any bites, and they had to know that, but it’d remind them the Empire wasn’t the only group watching close if they slipped.  
  
I didn’t plan on giving them reason to go after me once I started caping, but I felt it prudent to keep tabs on the PRT the same way I did for the gangs. Even once I was an established heroine I’d probably have a rocky relationship with them at best. Their director oversaw the Wards program, after all, and that spoke volumes.  
  
A buzz from my pocket drew my attention. I pulled out my phone. Charlotte had texted me a link to a video guide for eyeliner. I put my phone away. I wasn’t sure I’d get much out of it, and I’d meant it when I said it probably wasn’t for me, but I knew I was still going to watch it.  
  
The bus let me off and I walked the last ten minutes to my house. I might’ve taken the opportunity to get another run in, but I had plans for tonight and it would have been stupid to tire myself out first.  
  
Dad’s truck was in the driveway when I got there. I skipped one of the steps up to the porch, only remembering it wasn’t broken anymore while I was unlocking the door. It’d been fixed months ago, and it’d be months still before I got used to that fact.  
  
The smell of meat, spices, and what I thought might be zucchini greeted me first, followed by a call from further inside. “I'm in the kitchen!”  
  
I detoured through the living room, finding the TV on. It was set to some news channel - Dad liked to keep it on while he was cooking for the background noise - where pundits with greying hair and bland, expensive suits were debating the political role and responsibilities of the Protectorate. Even they looked tired of the argument.  
  
“-the numbers. Twelve percent decrease in property damage expenses caused by cape fights in the last  _three years_. And then that money goes right to the things we should actually be worrying about. Education. Reopening trade. Making businesses feel safe enough to bring in jobs.  _That's_  what we're missing out on by taking these half-measures with funding changes.”  
  
“That's Eugene. Those numbers are from them giving up against the Elite. Of course there's not going to be property damage if they let crime go on without a fight, but that's not even an option for Brockton! The conflict will happen here whether the PRT is prioritized or not. What the half-measures have done for us is they drove Armsmaster to the Guild by stunting his budget. I don't want to see what going further gets us. There's-”  
  
Nothing new. I heaved my backpack onto the couch and went to the kitchen.  
  
Dad was at the stove, stirring a pot of something. He craned his neck at me. “Hey, champ. You're home late.”  
  
“Hey Dad. You're home early.”  
  
He turned back to the stove, grinning. “I had the day set aside to meet with Christner’s aide, but he didn't put up much of a fight.”  
  
“Really?”  
  
He lifted the ladle to his lips and sipped, then reached for the spice rack. “His campaign contributors are lighting a fire under his ass to beat out Boston. The Graveyard shift gets as many hours and hires as it needs. And to think, it only took a measly ten goddamn years.”  
  
I frowned. “They're still calling it that?”  
  
“What, not clever enough?” He sprinkled a pinch of something into the pot.  
  
“It was called Lord's Port first, right? If it's going to go back to that after its cleaned up, why not call it the Lord's work?”  
  
He chuckled and pointed the ladle at me. “That's not half bad! I might use that.”  
  
“All yours. What's cooking?”  
  
He stepped aside to give me a view. “Just trying a new soup recipe. Some sausage and zucchini deal. It's about done if you want to grab some bowls.”  
  
When I'd set the table and he'd turned off the TV and served the soup we both took a minute to turn the flavor over before talking more. The peppers were a touch limp and there wasn't enough onion, but all in all it wasn't bad. He wasn't a natural at cooking but he could make a simple meal well enough and really, the fact that he was trying something new at all warmed me up more than the food.  
  
“So,” he said between spoonfuls, “did you spend some time with Charlotte after school?” His eyebrows rose meaningfully.  
  
“Yeah. We did homework.”  
  
“Mm. Should I expect her here again soon?”  
  
I lowered my spoon and glared at him. “We're not dating.”  
  
He raised his hands, looking the picture of innocence.  
  
I kept up the glare for a moment, then went back to my bowl. “Monday or Tuesday. You'll probably be at work.”  
  
“What, ashamed of your old man?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“Ouch.” He smirked.  
  
I rolled my eyes.  
  
We ate the rest in silence. It wasn't exactly awkward, but it wasn't the same as what I got with Charlotte, either. It was our resting state together, now. Things were fine while we could ride the momentum of a conversation, but only so long as we skimmed the surface of things, kept to the day-to-day happenings, ventured just the shallow issues. I couldn't bring up the real problems and he didn't know what they were to ask, and there were good reasons for that.  
  
I couldn't tell him I had powers. First, he'd be hurt that I'd kept it from him for months. He already blamed himself for how we'd drifted apart after Mom died and this would only compound that guilt. Second, he'd never let me go out on my own. I figured he'd make me choose between joining the Wards or not caping at all, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to sneak out at a reliable rate.  
  
I couldn't tell him I was a girl, either, for the same reasons in different contexts. I'd have to if I wanted to get on hormone replacement therapy, but statistics on how safe people like me weren't would be an internet search away and he'd feel like he always had to worry about my safety. Worse, the fact that he'd not recognized what was going on with me would eat him up inside. It wouldn't be his fault - by the time I'd realized it myself I'd already mastered deflecting his concern - but that wasn't how he'd see it.  
  
He'd only just started to feel good about how his job was going. If I dropped either bombshell on him right now that'd crumble as collateral, tainted by proximity, and I wasn't sure he'd recover from that.  
  
We finished eating. He put away the leftovers and went to the living room to watch TV. I rinsed the dishes in the sink and climbed the stairs to my room. Neither of us said anything.  
  
I locked my bedroom door, then double-checked that it was locked. It wasn't time yet, wouldn't be until night fell and Dad went to bed, but I needed to indulge my anticipation a little, tide myself over while I waited.  
  
I approached the door to my closet the way a prisoner might a sleeping guard’s keyring. It opened slow- minimal noise. On the floor of the closet there was a pile of clothes, ones I hardly wore. Underneath that pile was a pair of black workman's boots and a bag a lot like the one I used to store my gym clothes. Inside was a folded bundle of thick grey material, and hidden in the folds was a black cyclist’s facemask and a pair of high-quality swimming goggles. The lenses of the goggles were tinted silver and had the slightest reflective sheen.  
  
I held them up, looked into them, and saw myself, blurred and half-defined but  _there_.  
  
I smiled.


	3. 1.3 Crude

As soon as I heard Dad's bedroom door shut I snapped my notebook closed. I'd had my nose in it through sundown and past, reviewing everything I knew about Brockton Bay’s cape scene. There was only so much one could learn from the news, cape info sites and PHO, but with rumors and personal observations supplementing I’d compiled what I thought was a perfectly adequate account of the major powers, the minor players, the powers themselves, and the significant events between them all. Rereading it had felt like cramming for a test, except the proctors might be other capes and the questions could be anything from steel-piercing lasers to bloody-knuckled fists. The dissonance stirred a thrill in my stomach.  
  
I dug my costume back out of the closet and stuffed the components into one of my old school backpacks. After triple-checking my door was locked I greased the window's mechanism with my oil and slid it just a few inches open, whisper-quiet. Pack held close to my chest, I braced myself. This was one of the most challenging aspects of my power and I had a long way to go before I got used to it. A deep breath centered me and I poured forth and spilled out of the window.  
  
The streetlights didn't quite reach the face of our house, so I didn't have to worry about my shimmer catching someone's eye and giving me away. The most anyone watching would see was a strip from my sill to the porch where the dark might have looked darker, where night turned condensate and ran like hot syrup. Two swells in the stream dripped down below where the porch railing blocked the view, and then the last of the stuff followed, the house ordinary as ever.  
  
I fumbled my regular clothes around with only a little more grace than one would expect of a living puddle, trying to arrange each item into position. Sight, smell and taste were stripped from me when I was fully transformed, leaving me to navigate by feel alone. I could approximate hearing through the sensations of sound waves rippling through my malleable form, but translating them into legible input or even speech was a work in progress.  
  
Once I was satisfied I drew myself close and oozed into the outfit. Congealing between the right layers took significant concentration but I managed to retake my base form fully clothed, if face-down. I stood, my pack met my back, my shoes hit the sidewalk and I was on my way.  
  
Over the last week I’d spent a lot of time on and off deliberating over what territory I should patrol first, which gang’s members I would cut my teeth on. The Archer’s Bridge Runners or any other minor group would be relatively easy targets, but they'd be poor indicators of what to expect from the dominant gangs. Fenrir’s Chosen owned the Docks and oversaw plenty of operations worth crashing. They ran drugs and protection rackets more as a matter of course but they were infamous for their illegal fighting rings, from dogs to humans to parahumans. Purity’s Empire controlled portions of the city further south: downtown, the new industrial areas, bits and pieces of the shopping district. They weren’t quite the organizational powerhouse they'd been under Kaiser but they made up for it by being more destructive, and they certainly weren’t hurting for raw power. Retaining most of what they held in downtown in the face of an aggressive PRT was no small feat.  
  
In the end my decision had come down to basic logistics: the Docks were closer, and it would be much, much easier to sneak around there than anywhere else.  
  
An alley close to the edge of Chosen territory proper offered ample seclusion. I crouched behind a dumpster, unzipped my pack, laid my costume out on the least dirty spot, and drained out of my clothes. It started with the boots - sturdy, reliable, perforated where leather met sole, with just the right amount of grip. Flame-resistant grey coveralls in a women’s cut made up the bulk, pant legs loose and rolled a good ways up my calves, sleeves cut off altogether. They were the kind welders wore, easy to get ahold of when you knew where to go. From beneath its collar all the way up to the bridge of my nose a black biker’s facemask obscured my features, stretched like a second skin. I had to put the goggles on by hand, and with the prescription lenses I’d popped out of an old pair of glasses and set into them, I could see again.  
  
The most important component of my costume came last. A twitch of will summoned oil to cover every inch of exposed skin, from my forehead to my arms to my shins. I ran my fingers through my curls, soaking them enough to darken them past black and grant the same chromatic shimmer as my skin where the light hit them. My arms were like gradients of void, oil thinnest at the shoulders and thick enough to imitate living shadows at the hands. The tips of my fingers were outright liquid, and once I stopped holding back they'd drip and drench like faucets.  
  
I hadn't a mirror handy but I already knew what my costume looked like complete. The base pieces were all rather mundane but my power elevated the look. In the dark it melded with my mask and boots, silhouetted me, and in the light I was a glistening medley of melted color, burnt orange and red in places, unearthly blue and green in others. I didn't have curves to fill out the coveralls the way I should have but the cut of it, the slim upper body, cinched waist and flared hips, turned my dial up to a feminine-leaning androgyny. It tickled me giddy.  
  
My backpack stuffed with civilian clothes and ensconced behind the dumpster, I set out, skimming pavement like ice.  
  
This was one of the tricks I was most proud of. Wet leaked from the perforations I’d made in my boots and soaked the soles slick, and I had spent months practicing until I could use them like skates. I needed to let up on my power to slow or turn and cut it off to stop, but my boots had the perfect amount of grip to manage on most surfaces.  
  
I glided down the lengths of the Docks’ streets, keeping to the shadows. Not a challenge, as even with the city starting to invest in its business again, more hours didn’t yet mean repaired infrastructure and there were still swaths of the area going without power. Though I had to zig-zag between streets to avoid crossing paths with the occasional drunk or druggie, I covered a good amount of ground. There was the occasional obvious dealer on a corner here and there but going after them wouldn’t net anything but the drugs and cash on them, and at that point I’d be more mugger than heroine. I was looking for more.  
  
Busting an operation would have a real, tangible impact on the Chosen, whether drug packing, dog fighting, or pit fighting, and charges on any members I captured would actually stick. On a level above that, if I found a cape fight to interrupt? If I managed to  _win?_  All the better.  
  
Problem was, I didn’t know where to look.  
  
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. The Chosen were picky about full membership, I knew that, but they’d been ramping up in power and popularity ever since Fenrir had made his big debut and weren’t suffering for prospects. On top of that, they had almost as many capes as the Empire now, closing in with the likely new hire. In retrospect assuming that’d mean I’d just eventually bump into _something_  was pretty naive, but it wasn’t like I had any real leads.  
  
I was rethinking my canvassing strategy when I heard it. Metal screaming and shrieking, drawn out like a car crash in slow motion. Not far. It echoed off the buildings in a way that almost obfuscated the direction it’d come from, but my head was pointed firmly northeast. I thought I could feel it in my oil, too, where the strongest ripples started. Maybe it was just me wanting to confirm I’d gotten better at doing that, but there wasn’t time to think. I veered towards the sound.  
  
Further noise cracked the flimsy peace, sharp, throaty jolts loud enough to make me flinch the first couple times. The auditory breadcrumbs led me to what I was pretty sure was a warehouse; there weren't many factories this deep in the Docks. Windows lined its side in a row a story and a half or so off the ground. One was broken, shattered outward. The loud sounds had tapered off but closer up I could hear more like them, chorusing feral dissonance, a challenge to concentrate against but easy to put a name to.  
  
Barking.  
  
This was a dog fighting ring.  
  
Trails of blood lead away from the door, still red, still wet. They seemed too thin to be from any truly dire injuries but there was enough to explain why no one was posted outside. Each ended somewhere by the side of the street so I didn't have the option of chasing them down, but that was fine. It hadn't been a consideration. I could still feel that initial cacophony of grinding metal in my ears, on my skin. The adjacent building offered an access ladder up to its roof, the grate blocking the first set of rungs long gone. I climbed up.  
  
Trash littered the rooftop. A cluster of 40 oz husks lay next to the top of the ladder and broken beer bottles spread in treacherous, glinting stains about the rest. A crumpled cigarette pack here, a torn chip bag there. I toed around the flotsam and made my way to the low rise of the edge.  
  
There he was.  
  
From my elevated angle I could see most of him through the windows, a ways down the warehouse’s length. He was a tower of bulky muscle and coarse body hair crammed into a tank top and jeans, loose and relaxed the way other brick walls weren’t. His head was turned away from me but I could see the border where the spines of his angular metal mask spewed greasy blond strands down to his shoulder blades. One arm hung limp, thumb hooked in the belt loop of his jeans. The other disappeared at the shoulder, from which blades and spikes and hooks conglomerated into a length as thick as a tree trunk. The mass extended off to one side, where I couldn’t see, but whatever was there his attention wasn’t on it.  
  
Fenrir. Leader of the Chosen. Kaiser’s killer.  
  
One of the most dangerous men in Brockton Bay, and here I was, a two-bit nobody with zero experience and an underwhelming power.  
  
Great.  
  
The barking showed no sign of stopping but it’d simmered down some, lost just enough of its lashing, panicked edge for me to make out a conversation.  
  
“-got your attention, didn’t it?” His voice was a deep rumble, a stable contrast to the barking.  
  
“Let. Her. Go.” Another voice, gruff, bitter, just this side of a growl.  
  
“Keep her small and she won’t get hurt.”  
  
No response, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Over the next minute or so his metal extension shifted, slowly angling down.  
  
He huffed with a trace of amusement. “Wasn’t so hard.”  
  
“Fuck you.”  
  
“Doesn’t have to be so hard in the first place. Offer’s still on the table.”  
  
“It’s a shit offer.”  
  
“It’s the best you’ll get. You can only keep this up so long, and I’m not just talking ‘bout my patience. There’s only so many empty hideouts that the PRT aren’t watching. How many times have you had to pack your dogs and jump ship just this year?”  
  
“Some of those were because of you.”  
  
He shrugged. The metal appendage shifted oddly. “A group like this expands. You got caught in that. Would’ve happened eventually.” He leaned in the slightest bit. “I can let you have any of those places back if you join.”  
  
So that was it - the other person was a cape. I couldn’t see one of the biggest names in the city coming in person to push recruitment like this if they weren’t.  
  
The mystery cape scoffed. “Right.”  
  
“All of ‘em, if you need it, and vans to move your dogs around too. Protection. Food. Power. More chew toys than they’ll know what to do with. All  _you’d_  have to do is show up for fights when you can. Go a few rounds in the Pit time to time.”  
  
A pause. “And the rings? Like this?”  
  
He grunted. “I won’t tell you what to do with your dogs. Not your place to tell me what to do with mine.”  
  
They coughed and spat. “Then fuck off.”  
  
He shook his head. Lengths of metal retracted into his changed arm and in a moment it was withdrawn from out of view. It was only twice the size of his other arm now, more defined in shape. Spikes and spines poked out, points tilted up towards the shoulder in an imitation of bristling fur. In place of a hand, thick hooks protruded from the end, forming a vicious claw.  
  
I didn’t like where this was going. I had been frozen for as long as I’d listened, glued to the edge of the roof, but now I seethed with the urge to move, to do  _something._  
  
I was on my feet before I realized it, backing up and sweeping trash out of my way as I went. I crouched when I reached the other edge, legs tensing, soles becoming wet. My heart hammered against my ribcage, which was ready to liquefy at any moment along with the rest of me. My pulse or something like it reached my ears. I hoped to everything that months of stunting around in empty parking garages would pay off.  
  
I pushed off, then pushed again, and again. Each push net me more momentum, and by the time I reached the end of the roof I was a blur, rocketing over the gap between it and the warehouse. My pride swelled when I managed to hit the window boots-first, shattering it, but it dropped into my stomach when the impact threw me off my balance. I tilted backwards before hitting the ground, tumbling across concrete, wholly disoriented. My body crashed into something wood and splintered it but came to a stop at the next wood something.  
  
My hands met the black tarp under me when I pushed myself up. I drew in the bits of me that’d splashed onto it, then rose the rest of the way.  
  
Fenrir stood end of the place, stance shifted. To one side was a lineup of caged dogs, snarling and wild. To the other was a pile of raw, reddish, fleshy mass, some shredded, some not. I was surprised to see what looked like a regular terrier among them. Past all that, leaning against the far wall, was a girl. She had scruffy auburn hair, a jacket with fur trim, and a bleeding gash in her leg.  
  
It sounds ridiculous, but it took me a moment to register they were all, dog included, looking at me, sopping wet and standing in what was left of the dog fighting pit.  
  
What was I supposed to say?  
  
“Hey.”  
  
Probably not that.  
  
Every ounce of my being quivered, waiting for Fenrir to attack, but he managed to pull the one thing I wasn’t anticipating.  
  
He threw his head back, and he  _laughed._  
  
“D for presence, zilch for the landing, and fuck if I even know what you’re supposed to be, but-” The last of his blades and hooks retracted into his skin and he used a slow clap as punctuation. “A,” clap, “for,” clap, “effort.”  
  
 _Clap._  
  
I hesitated, bewildered as to what was going on, then tilted my head.  
  
Understanding my question he said, “Anyone who makes a real entrance gets a real fight, kid.” His arms spread wide, open. The mask hid his face but I could taste the grin in his next few words.  
  
“Show me what you got.”


	4. 1.4 Crude

This was not what I’d been expecting.  
  
There’d been little to no doubt in my mind that Fenrir would turn on me as soon as I made my presence known. He was infamous specifically for his tendencies toward violence and feared for his extensive capabilities and slicing, skewering instruments thereof. While my exact motivations couldn't be any more clear to him than they were to me, I had to assume that, even for capes, crashing through someone's window and smashing into their stuff didn't constitute a friendly hello.  
  
I’d had a general outline of events in my head. Sharp implements of all shapes and sizes would make an appearance. He’d shred my guts some here, dismember me a bit there, and while he was busy turning me into an inky purée the unknown cape and her dog would get a chance to run. Once he’d reduced me to a puddle with goggles he’d leave, empty-handed. I was pretty sure I could survive that.  
  
In reality he'd missed his mark for step one completely; there wasn't a single visible piece of metal on his person save for his mask. Not from this angle, at least. He stood there, collected, expectant, backed by feral barks and growls. When I failed to make a move he clucked his tongue. “C’mon, kid. No backing out. Finish what you start.”  
  
I grit my teeth. My soaked arms made quick, sweeping arcs up and across, flinging splashes of oil his way. It was slippery stuff and tough to get off if you couldn’t absorb it, so getting some on him could seriously impede his mobility for as long as he maintained his untransformed state.  
  
He ducked around the attacks with ease, in motion before I even finished the sweeps. To add insult to inevitable injury one of his thumbs was hooked in his belt loop again. After the first couple times I noticed he was stepping forward with each dodge, slowly closing the distance between us. At best I'd get him lightly misted before he reached me.  
  
I switched tactics, backing into the dog pit’s barrier. My arms swept lower, spreading streaks across his path that crisscrossed and bled into a decent amount of coverage. The warehouse interior was too wide to smother in full but I'd settle for reducing his playing field as much as I could.  
  
Instead of slowing down for the sake of caution he started to ramp up his approach, stepping with the balls of his bare feet on gaps in the crosshatch. The length of his strides increased to work around the pattern but the tempo of his steps remained constant, as though to reinforce that even if he let me make the first moves, we were doing this at his pace, at his leisure. When I aimed subsequent splashes at where I thought he was going to step next he started feinting different directions, ducking under a crest I'd been tricked into aiming high, advancing from one side once he'd gotten me to commit a swipe at another. His eyes, deep set and severe behind his jagged metal wolf mask, had yet to look away from me.  
  
When he was only a few steps away from the pit I went for a few final attempts to land hits on his person. He sidestepped the first but allowed the second and third to connect as he stepped over the far wood barrier onto the tarp. They netted a pair of stripes across his tank top and the legs of his jeans, stained black and soggy. An acceptable trade, apparently, for the gut punch that came next.  
  
I tried to block it with my arms but the weight of its impact was tremendous, forcing them to liquefy, ploughing through and sending me tumbling backwards over the other barrier and onto the concrete. I scrambled back to regain my footing and evade any piercing bits, but he just stepped out of the pit himself and stood there in front of me, thumb in loop, disturbingly human. My oil was flowing faster now so in moments I had enough to reform my arms and coat them. In the interest of stalling I waited for him to move first, this time.  
  
He seemed content to watch me put myself back together. When I’d finished he said, “Regenerator to boot, huh? I’ve seen worse. Seen a lot better too, though.” He swiped some moisture off his tank top with a pinky, seemed to consider it for a second, then shook his head and wiped it onto his jeans. “Can’t figure your plan, getting into this. What’d you think you were gonna do, trip me? Make my blades move smoother?”  
  
I didn’t answer.  
  
“You’re not here for her,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “No team. The only one she even talks to is the blue bitch and you’re no flying brick. So either you’re dumb as shit and you're here for me, or-”  
  
I was trying to peek around him to check if the other girl had gone yet, but before I could he grabbed me by the jaw and forced my attention back to him. Gone from his eyes was the languidness I hadn’t recognized until it wasn’t there - now they bore into me like drills poised to gouge. A tremor of undiluted fear rattled down my spine, the kind that doesn’t care how much hurt you think you can take, the kind I imagined wild animals knew in their last moments.  
  
Fenrir rose his voice just enough to drive the point home. “Your fight is  _here_ , dumbass. She stopped existing the moment you made your entrance. Now either you’re here for me, or you’re here for you, and her being here was a good enough excuse. So tell me, do you have the brains of a chimp? Or do you have the balls of an ele-”  
  
My lower jaw dissolved in his grasp beneath my mask and I pulled back before he could adjust. I tried to make the most of the surprise and jab at his throat but he redirected my strike. His follow-through twisted my arm until the joint locked painfully. I had to sacrifice everything halfway down my bicep to get out of the hold, leaving me with a gushing stump. The sudden loss of resistance made him stumble and my stump spewed in his foot’s path. He didn't fall but he slipped on the slick enough to throw his balance for a split second, and instinct told me I'd just created the closest thing to an opening I was going to get.  
  
Every ounce of concentration I had went into my next move. I swung my intact arm at his head, a little higher than where I wanted to hit. He raised an arm to block mine, but just before contact I let it go liquid, still following through with my new stump, correcting for gravity. Once it was past his block I pushed my power out to reconnect with the oil that had been my arm, fixed where it'd lost shape, and solidified it just in time to deliver the most vicious haymaker I could muster.  
  
His mask covered his face and most of the rest of him felt hard as metal, but, as it turned out, neither defense protected his ear. He recoiled from the blow, suddenly appearing less the immovable object, if only for an instant.  
  
I barely had the chance to revel in my accomplishment before one of his ankles hooked around the back of mine and he barged his shoulder into me, the combination pushing the wind out of my chest and knocking me on my ass again.  
  
Somehow, this wasn't followed up by furious retaliatory blending.  
  
Instead, to my astonishment, he was laughing.  _Again_.  
  
It was different this time, though I couldn't quite quantify how. There was more… ease in it? Satisfaction? I hesitated to associate him with any sort of jubilance but I thought there was an undercurrent of that, too.  
  
My arms had reformed just down past my elbows and I propped myself up on them. I tried to speak but all that came out was a bubbling gurgle, and I realized I'd never reformed my lower jaw; the slack in my facemask had been filling with oil instead. I corrected that and redirected excess to my arms.  
  
When I spoke it was with a voice developed over months of solitary practice. No one but Charlotte had heard me use this voice before, and even she'd only heard it when my need for outside feedback had begun to outweigh my embarrassment. It wasn't some dumb falsetto, like boys used when mocking girls. It was just my own voice, sourced more from my head than my chest, pushed to the upper limits of my range - which I'd been slowly extending - and held there. All the minute, signifying inflections I'd learned to suppress for fear of getting beaten up, I let loose now. It was still pretty low for a girl but I could live with it.  
  
“What- what about you?”  
  
His laughing had petered off but his good mood hadn't. “What about me?”  
  
I swallowed. “Why are you doing this? Bothering to toy with me, if I'm not worth your time?”  
  
He touched a hand to the ear I'd hit and it came back tipped with blood -  _perforated eardrum?_ He hardly seemed bothered. “Take it from a man that's won a lot of fights: there's more to it than the short term, the winners and losers. Smartest man I knew taught me that. Bastard though he was, Kaiser got it, too. Had a smooth hand with it, subtle.”  
  
He continued. “Purity doesn't have that. She can run the day-to-day, win a battle with the badges or my Chosen in the now, but she's got no  _long game_ , no end goals. The Empire will just get chipped away until she's got nothing left to stand on. Me, I don't have the finesse either, but the way things will pan out I won't need it. I'm making moves to set up for when I rule this city and they start sending lapdog capes from outside after me and mine.  
  
“What's happening here is one of those moves. This?” He pointed to his ear. “This says you dropping in wasn't a fluke. You've got fire in you, more than just stupid mistakes or cape crazy. Once you've gotten into some real fights and made something of yourself, I want you in the Pit, pushing my Chosen past their limits. Doing your part to lift up the next era.”  
  
“You seem pretty sure I'm going to join up.” My voice only wavered a little.  
  
He rolled his broad shoulders in what might have been a shrug. “You'll have enough reasons.”  
  
Unsure what he meant by that I said, “...So what now?”  
  
The sounds of his knuckles cracking were like fireworks. “Now you run off and I show Bitch what happens if she charges her power when I told her not to.”  
  
A whistle pierced the air.  
  
He turned around just as a series of rapid impacts shook the ground. Before he could transform more than halfway, a hulking mass of meat, spines, and teeth crashed into him jaws-first. The creature barreled past me, above me, feet thundering on either side of my barely-solid body. It was like being trapped on the tracks while a train passed over me. A long, whiplike tail trailed after the body.  
  
I rose to my feet in time to see the beast bust through the double doors in the front, Fenrir erupting into blades in its maw. It spat him out onto the street and he whirled into shape, twisting and shifting from an amorphous mass into a decent approximation of a huge wolf. He wasn't as big as the creature but his spikes matched its spines three-to-one, if not more.  
  
From the other end of the warehouse, slumped where wall met floor, the other girl called out, “Angelica! Kill!”  
  
What followed was an almost incomprehensible storm of metal and meat clashing, thrashing each other apart. The creature gnashed and tore away edges with its mouth. Fenrir’s body ground and carved in turn, working through the tough flesh. The chunks that sloughed off looked just like the ones piled in the corner and I realized the creature - Angelica - probably was or was made from the now-absent terrier.  
  
I hurried over to the girl and knelt beside her. She hadn't lost too much blood from her leg wound, but she'd stopped trying to put weight on it and she looked a little dazed. It occurred to me she wasn't wearing a mask, but there wasn't much to be done about it.  
  
“Hey,” I said, trying not to let my jitters show, “I- I don't know how much I can help, but… do you have a knife?”  
  
Her eyes met mine through her haze and narrowed, mouth set in what seemed a constant scowl.  
  
“I move around too much to keep anything in my costume and you need to put pressure on that.”  
  
The wooziness reasserted itself and she wavered. As if recognizing she didn't have another option, she shut her eyes and pulled a pocket knife from her jacket.  
  
I said, “Thanks,” and right after felt stupid for it. I was the one fixing her up, after all. The knife unfolded easy and I cut through the thick fabric of her pants around the wound. It ran wide enough on her shin that I only had to cut out a couple inches extra to create the cloth I tied it off with. Blood started to darken its earthy tone but in all it didn’t look too shabby.  
  
I wasn’t sure how much gratitude I’d been expecting, but it’d at least been more than a, “Hmph,” and a brush aside. Her eyes widened at the scene outside and I turned to look as well.  
  
Fenrir was making quick work of Angelica, having cleaved away maybe a quarter of her body mass. She didn’t seem to be hurting much for it but danger was nipping at her enormous heels. The girl gave another shrill whistle, this time with a different inflection, and Angelica broke away from the shredding death. She almost made it to the busted front entrance but he was after her like a rocket. His claws came within a foot or two of her haunch.  
  
From out of nowhere a blur shot into Fenrir’s center mass, and the next moment he was gone from view. I could hear his metal scraping pavement as he tumbled down the street. The blur doubled back to the warehouse entrance, less a blur and more a person now, hovering a couple feet off the ground. She was tall, though it was hard to tell how much of that was just the flying, and she held herself with confidence. Her costume consisted of sneakers, dark wash skinny jeans, a navy jacket half-zipped over a white tee, and a sleek white full-face mask that started to gradient at the edges into light blues, then darker hues where it disappeared under her hood.  
  
“Okay,” she said, gaze lingering in the direction she’d sent Fenrir flying, “that’ll buy us a hot minute but the uniforms will be here soon, so grab-”  
  
As she entered the warehouse her head turned to us, and when her opaque blue eyeholes met my goggles she stilled, then rushed right at me. Fists gripped the collar of my coveralls, lifted me by them and pinned me to the wall. Between the lingering adrenal frisson of fighting a gang boss, the renewed barking of the caged dogs, and the sheer weight of this cape’s presence, I was having a hell of a time maintaining solidity.  
  
“So it’s true, the Chosen got themselves a new idiot,” she said, mask looming close to my face. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Vega, and you’re a two-bit  _asshole_  who hurt my friend.” She tilted her head. “Nice to beat you.”


	5. 1.5 Crude

I tensed, ready for the fists that would juice me like an orange.  
  
“Not Chosen.”  
  
Both Vega’s eyes and my own snapped to the wounded dog girl, who was beckoning Angelica to approach. Vega said, “Uh,” and then, “Oh,” and “Really?” When I gave a jerky nod she asked, “Then what were you doing here?” She looked to the girl again. “Is-”  
  
“Not my friend.”  
  
Vega deflated a bit.  
  
 _Well it’s been nice meeting you, too_ , I thought. Out loud I said, “I was patrolling in the area and I heard her and Fenrir fighting. I just… dropped in.”  
  
“Just ‘dropped in’ on  _Fenrir_ , huh?”  
  
“Y-” My throat clogged; I gulped. “Yes?”  
  
Dog Girl reached out a hand as Angelica drooped her head and rubbed her monstrous snout. “Aura.”  
  
“Shit!” Vega dropped me, and suddenly it was much less of a challenge to stay solid, to look her in the eyeholes. “Ugh, and I was doing so well with it lately, too!” She considered Dog Girl's leg and said, “You helped fix her up?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
She looked to Dog Girl to confirm and received an affirming grunt. “Okay, cool, you're off my shitlist then. For now, at least. And, you know, sorry about the whole… yeah.”  
  
“It's, uh, fine. I don't think you could have-” I straightened like a prairie dog. “Wait, where's Fenrir?”  
  
Vega paused. “Hold on.” She raised a hand, and with the talking lulled and my ears focused I could hear a rolling wail in the distance. “Fuck,” she said, “Badges. We gotta go.” She flew to the nearby back exit, checking around outside for something.  
  
“But all we did was fight a villain,” I said. “Why would we get in trouble for that?”  
  
Despite her mask being all but expressionless she managed to inject incredulity into its non-features. “Is this your first night caping or something?”  
  
I hesitated to answer.  
  
“Oh. Oh, wow, is it? I wasn't serious.” She floated up to the windows lining the top of the walls, continuing as she peered into the alleys. “Well, then take some advice, okay? Stay away from cops and the PRT, if you can help it. Even if the cops aren't as bad-” Dog Girl huffed “-they have to call in the PRT once they know capes are involved in something, and  _they_  only ever make things worse. Better to keep your distance.”  
  
She looked down the last corner, sighed, and lowered back down to just above us. “Bad enough there's no vans around to move the dogs, but now there's not even enough time to go get one. If only  _someone_ had told me  _ahead of time_  that she was hitting this place tonight, maybe I could've _helped_.”  
  
“You said no when I brought it up,” Dog Girl growled.  
  
Vega threw up her hands. “Because there was a good chance Fenrir would be here, and look at that, he was! And now these dogs are gonna be dumped into cheap centers that don't give a shit about them, and that's if they're lucky.”  
  
“I could help carry one,” I blurted, and wasn't it interesting that  _that_  was what earned me my first non-hostile look from Dog Girl? “If you want to bring at least one with. I can take a lot of punishment.” I demonstrated by dispersing and then recreating my forearm. “If it's aggressive or anything, I mean.”  
  
They looked at each other. Vega said, “That would mean taking you to-”  
  
“It’s fine,” Dog Girl interrupted, pushing up to her feet and leaning on Angelica. “She’s offering. We won’t be able to keep the place secret long anyways.”  
  
 _She._  
  
Suddenly my chest felt light. “I won’t say anything to anyone.” Not that I had anyone to tell, really, but saying that would probably have been counterproductive.  
  
Vega shook her head. “Fine. That means we can take three. Bitch, which ones?”  
  
Against my expectations Dog Girl didn't react at all to being called bitch; she merely pointed at three of the caged dogs. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize it might be an on-theme cape name for her.  
  
Vega picked up the cages of a pair of pitbulls like they weighed nothing, one with each hand, and they gnashed and scratched where she laced her fingers through the top bars, ineffectual. She busted the lock to the last one open with a kick, then gestured me over with a tilt of her head.  
  
The dog inside was a sinewy mess of a mutt, torn-eared, lined with memories of wounds, a mottled grey-brown coat housing an oddly stoic disposition. Its beady eyes fixed on me and in them I thought I could see what had compelled Bitch(?) to crash this operation anyways.  
  
Figuring she would know best how to make this go smooth I looked to her. “Let him sniff your hand first,” she said, and I did, retracting the oil on it first. He took a tentative whiff, still looking like a old rusted bear trap, caught in a perpetual state of Schrödinger’s lethality. He did not bite.  
  
“No time for anything else. Lead him out by the collar, pick him up and get on.” She climbed Angelica's bone spikes and mounted her, only a touch slowed by her injury.  
  
She was right, I could hear the sirens much closer now. I led him out from the dingy cage and over to Angelica. He finally bit me when I picked him up, snapping down on my wrist, but all it got him was oil on his teeth, which I made sure to retract. He didn't try again. Angelica's hide proved easy enough to climb one-handed and I managed to settle behind Bitch, a ridge of bone in my grip and a dog under my arm like a flea-ridden hay bale.  
  
“Okay,” Vega said, “Sounds like they're at Sullivan by now. Fishhook north, then east. I'll fly low in case they brought Dovetail or Aegis.” She shot out the door at the back.  
  
Without so much as a “Hold on,” Bitch whistled and Angelica burst into motion, bolting out the front of the warehouse. My heart jostled in my ribcage and it was all I could do to hold on to my ride and my charge both. Somehow we were already moving fast enough the streets were becoming a blur but I was able to make the distinction that, though I could hear the sirens and see the flashing lights spread over the building faces, I couldn’t see any response vehicles yet, and thus they hadn’t seen us. A small relief when I was stuck riding something pulled out of the harshest annals of all mythologies.  
  
The first time we banked a ninety-degree turn I very nearly lost both grip and metaphorical lunch, and if my powers didn’t make me so resilient I would have been feeling that in the morning, and the evening, and the morning after that too. The next turns were just as harsh but I was learning to preempt them by leaning in first.  
  
For a bit it seemed like we weren’t getting any further from the sirens but eventually, after we stopped making so many turns, we started to gain significant ground. When we’d gotten a good distance Vega swooped in next to us. The pitbulls didn’t look any happier but they’d reduced their barking to growls at least. “Clear,” she said, just loud enough to be heard over the rush of wind. “Over here.”  
  
We followed her into a series of alleys between run-down apartment buildings and came to a stop in a spot fully hidden from the streets. There was only barely room enough between Angelica’s bulk and the walls to dismount. When we had I was treated to a somewhat horrifying sight as Angelica sloughed off chunks of her huge body, spilling unusual flesh and bone onto the already dirty ground. Bitch pulled out a knife - a different one from the one I’d borrowed from her, this one’s blade didn’t fold and it looked a less-than-legal length - and plunged it into the belly of the beast, presumably to speed up the process. It wasn’t pleasant to watch.  
  
When half the mass was shed Bitch pulled a calm, normal-looking Angelica out. She and Vega started down the alleys. After stepping carefully around the mess of meat I’d ridden in on, I followed.  
  
The mutt I was carrying had yet to resist any more since biting me. I tried to look into his eyes but his were pointed straight ahead. I wondered for a moment if I should call him something other than “the mutt” but knew I probably shouldn’t be the one to name him.  
  
We came to the side door into a red-brick building, the faces of which hadn’t been washed in years. Door and chain both were rusted and the hinges creaked when opened. Inside there was a split in the floorspace: half was taken up by hefty, disused machinery, some bolted in place and others uprooted and shoved into a corner or wall, and half was occupied by all things dog. Blankets, beds, and toys; cages, bowls and leashes, scattered on the floor or hung from hooks in the walls. A couple gas generators were hooked up to simple lights and one or two wires disappeared up the walls.  
  
A cornucopia of dogs perked up and flooded around us, many coming to sniff the new dogs and me, until Bitch gave an order that scattered them back to their side. Angelica bounded up a spiral staircase in one corner. Bitch relieved me of my luggage and carried him over to the empty cages. Vega put the cages she was carrying down nearby and, as if just now remembering I was here, floated over to me.  
  
“So…” she started, “thanks, for this. Bitch won’t say it but I’m pretty sure she appreciates you helping.”  
  
“Hmph.”  
  
 _Pretty sure?_  “It’s not a big deal, really.”  
  
She folded her arms, and I started to recognize that, were she standing on the ground, Vega would come up almost as tall as me. With her half-foot hover she managed to make me feel short, and wasn’t that something? “Still, you didn’t have to, but you did.” She paused. “You said this was your first night patrolling, right?”  
  
“I didn’t actually say so, but it is,” I said, unsure where she was going with this.  
  
“And you were going it alone? No partner, no team?”  
  
I nodded.  
  
“Does Fenrir know you’re out on your own?”  
  
“He tried to peddle eventual recruitment to me after I fought him, so I’d assume he does.”  
  
A slight strain slipped into her tone. “Did he mention the Pit?”  
  
Again, I nodded.  
  
Vega swore under her breath. “Okay, well, that’s not as bad as him hating you, but it’s still pretty bad. Trust me when I say you want to stay under his radar as much as possible. He likes to go after independents like us, hero, villain, whatever, and poach them for the Chosen. It’s sort of how Bitch and I started working together-”  
  
“Sometimes,” Bitch grunted from the other end.  
  
“-sometimes. It’s easier to avoid getting cornered when you’ve got someone to watch your back. We find places like these to hide from the Chosen, I chip in with the dogs and busting rings, and she lets me hang here so I can be somewhere that isn’t school or home.”  
  
“Rambling,” Bitch said. Her back was still to us.  
  
“Anyways. So if you’re on your own… I don’t usually suggest this, especially not lately, but have you considered joining the Wards?”  
  
My jaw stiffened. I couldn’t keep the vitriol out of my voice. “Not happening.”  
  
Vega put up her hands, appeasing. “That’s fine! I get it, really. If you’re not going to, though… do you want in on what we’ve got going here? I’d be okay with it, and I’m pretty sure Bitch is, too-”  
  
Bitch shrugged, eyes on the hose she was unwinding.  
  
“-and I’d really rather not see another decent cape get conscripted.”  
  
I chewed on the offer. “Is this you putting together a team?”  
  
“ _No_ ,” they both chorused. Vega said, “Nothing official like that, we don’t have any big goals and we’re trying to keep low profiles. This is just us making sure we can each do what we do without getting snatched up or beaten down. All we’d ask is that you help us out when you can, and in return you’ll get backup when you need it and,” she gestured broadly around the space, “a pretty chill place to lay low.”  
  
I cocked a brow, though I wasn’t sure how well she could tell through my oil. “Um…”  
  
She waved me off. “It’s not all for the dogs. There’s this loft space upstairs too. We haven’t got much in it yet but there’s a couch and a TV, at least. Extra rooms too, if you want one for yourself.” She inclined her head, expectant.  
  
The offer was more than a little tempting. The fight with Fenrir and his interest in my capabilities had shaken me, and knowing I could count on two people with experience keeping that at bay would do wonders to set my mind at ease. On top of that, having people in my life I didn’t have to hide my power around, who understood what it was like to be a cape in a city turned against itself, sounded like a boon of its own. I wasn’t holding out hope that they’d want to be friends with me, but I’d take what I could get.  
  
What cinched it for me was that it came with minimal strings attached. If or when the stick to match the carrot came down, the option to cut my losses cleanly would be at my disposal. If it hurt, it didn’t have to hurt for long.  
  
“Alright,” I said. “I’m in.”  
  
Vega pumped a fist. “Cool!” she said. “Good, cool, okay. Welcome aboard.” She lowered to the ground and shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, abruptly casual. “Now that that’s settled, do you wanna get food? Bitch is gonna be tied up washing the ring dogs and their cages for forever and I’m  _sta-ha-harving_.” It came out as an unabashed whine. “Is night breakfast okay with you? I’ve been thinking about hash browns for probably the last hour.”  
  
The shift in tone caught me off-guard but now that she’d mentioned it, all that terror and thrill had stirred up a mean appetite. My adrenaline was slowly crashing and the idea of slinking into bed before replenishing my energy now seemed preposterous. “Sure. I don’t know if there’s anywhere serving breakfast this late, though.”  
  
She ‘tsk’ed, sounding genuinely offended. “You’ve never been to Hash-It-Out? God, do you even live in Brockton?” She took me by the wrist and started pulling me towards the door we’d come in through. “It’s decided, we’re going. Clearly someone needs to save you from yourself.”  
  
I let myself be dragged away - and wow, was her grip strong - but as we exited into the cold night air a thought came to me, and I almost liquefied on the spot.  
  
If we were going to eat together, I’d have to take off my mask.  
  
If I unmasked to her, I’d probably have to  _come out to her_.  
  
I swallowed, but the lump in my throat was there to stay.


	6. 1.6 Crude

“Okay, so,” Vega said, turning to face me in the alley, “there’s a few ways we can do this.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“People usually freak out if I just go for it, so I got into the habit of asking first. So I can run you through them, or you can take dealer’s choice.”  
  
I hesitated. She wasn’t making any sense right now. Do what? Run me through huh? My mind raced at the possibilities. I started to wonder if this had been some kind of set-up, for whatever reason, which only made my muted panicking intensify.  
  
Apparently my silence translated to ‘dealer’s choice’ to her. She shrugged, and then the next thing I knew I’d been scooped up in her arms in a princess carry and we were rising into the air. She barked a laugh at my undignified squeak. “Don’t worry,” she said, as we rose past the rooftops, twenty feet in the air now, “you’re actually in the  _safest_ -” thirty feet “-place in the city right now. Vega Airlines-” forty feet and  _moving forward_  “-has yet to drop a passenger. I mean, first time for everything, but-”  
  
She  _lurched_  down and to one side, and I damn near lost form in her arms, then she straightened back out. I swatted her on the shoulder for snickering and almost hurt my hand doing it. “See? Short of a guided missile or two you're gonna be just fine. Now let's get some potatoes in us.”  
  
“H-hold on,” I sputtered, barely hanging on to my stomach by the rope of my esophagus, “what part of town is this place in? I left-  _guh_  -left my stuff just west of here.”  
  
“Oh, it’s in that strip between downtown and the Boardwalk, near all the brownstone houses. We can go grab your stuff first, if you want.”  
  
“Please.” I didn’t trust my throat to let anything more out.  
  
She followed where I pointed, and when she was taking my directions, once I wasn’t just at her mercy, my insides settled down some. Now that I could bear to look around the view was stellar: I could see the general curve of the bay from this high, the points where dour concrete and brick gave way to moonlit waves, where the arches and spires of the Rig bore the brunt of the sea winds. It wasn’t the glowing beacon it’d been before they’d stopped running the shields, but I’d never gotten to see it from this angle. There was something weirdly intimate about that, and about seeing dirty rooftops normally hidden from sight, like catching your cousin smoking weed, or hearing a teacher cry behind a locked door. Things I wasn’t meant to be privy to but which uncovered a new layer of depth. My conceptualization of the city felt a little richer for it.  
  
She let me down at the mouth of the alley I’d first changed in and waited outside, though she continued to speak to me even as I ducked behind the dumpster. “You can change into civvies if you want, but you don’t have to. They don’t mind serving capes. Well, they more than ‘don’t mind’ but I’ll let you see for yourself.”  
  
I crouched there, backpack in hand, knotted in indecision. I was starting to recognize I’d asked her to bring me here in part because now that I had my things I could just run off. I doubted even she could make me stay if I so decided, and there was a tugging in my chest like a compass needle pulled toward the safety of my room, my bed. It would be such an easy thing, to just  _go_.  
  
“Hey, does- you can take your gunk  _out_  of things, right? Like, clothes? I only have one of this jacket and I don’t want it to stain if I turn off my- oh, I think some of it just dissolved. Still damp, though. Weird.”  
  
It was stupid, that I was still struggling so much with this. It wasn’t uncharted territory anymore, it shouldn’t be so hard. I’d come out to Charlotte already, and we’d been friends for months by then. I’d known Vega for all of a half hour. If it went bad I’d be losing next to nothing, in that regard. The logical thing to do would be to tell her now, to walk out in my usual clothes and rip the band-aid off quick.  
  
“I just realized I never asked you your cape name! Sorry, rude of me, I know, but we were caught up in the whole getting away thing. And the… me almost beating you up thing. Again, my bad.”  
  
I exited the alley in costume, backpack held in front. “Well, I haven’t come up with one yet, actually. I’m… not great with names.” That was true; even with Charlotte’s help I had yet to find something I liked better than  _Taylor, but as a girl’s name_. Maybe it was because Mom had chosen it, but all the alternatives I’d come up with had fallen short.  
  
“Really?” She picked me up again, and this time experience softened the impact of takeoff on my insides. “You’d better think of one soon, then. Capes without names always get stuck with the worst ones. All it takes is one villain talking shit to a crowd, or a half-assed temp designation and a press release, and then you’re something like ‘Dumbell’ forever.”  
  
“There’s not a lot of oil-related names that don’t sound absurdly villainous.”  
  
She shifted her gaze from the cityscape to me. “Ooh, I didn’t know it was oil. I can see it now, but I kind of thought it was… well, a bunch of different colors of paint or something. That shimmer it’s got is really cool.” She went quiet for a beat. “You're right though, that does make it harder. You could go with something besides oil names maybe? One that's more about the colors, or the general liquid aspect.”  
  
I frowned under my facemask. “Not much better. It's pitch black half the time. And the liquid- I mean, most of the good ones have to be taken already. What's left, Melter? Puddle?”  
  
“Puddle’s taken, actually. Hero in… Alabama, I think.” She shook her head. “Southerners choose the weirdest cape names.”  
  
“Huh.”  
  
“Anyways,” she said, beginning to descend, “let's shelve that. Right now we need to teach you our roots.”  
  
Surprised, I looked around. We were passing over the brownstone neighborhoods already, on course to drop into the shops and restaurants trapped on the cultural fringe. It hadn’t seemed like we were flying that fast. Maybe being above all the little points of reference had skewed that perception, though.  
  
Vega landed us in front of a hole in the wall sort of place, one where the owner clearly lived in the small apartment above it. The door was a ruddy shade of brown that didn’t quite match the faded bricks, and a sign overhead read “Hash-It-Out Diner” in blocky lettering. That felt like a miscategorization; the impression I got was closer to what I’d seen of dive bars deep in the Docks, at least in terms of atmosphere.  
  
Going inside only emphasized the likeness, and I found myself at one end of a long rectangular stretch of wood panelling, red seat cushions and stools, and low, moody lighting. A counter took up the left wall while cramped booths and framed photos cluttered the right. Bathrooms capped both just before the corners and the far wall boasted a big set of double doors.  
  
Of the scant few others inside, only one was bobbing his head to the old-school rock playing over the speakers, a stocky bearded man with hair more salt than pepper standing behind the counter, wiping it down. Mounted above his head on hooks in the wall was the biggest, meanest shotgun I’d ever seen. For a reason I couldn’t put my finger on it seemed more a reimagined sword of Damocles than a goad for Chekov.  
  
He nodded at Vega as we entered, gave me an appraising look, and asked her, in a scratchy Boston accent, “You bring trouble this time?”  
  
Vega waved him off. “C’mon Hash, she’s a new face but she’s no screwball. You don’t have anything to worry about.”  
  
He eyed my hair and arms. “Is that stuff gonna stain my seats?”  
  
I shook my head.  
  
He shrugged and went back to his work. “Room’s free. I’ll have two skillets of browns going in a minute. Anything else?”  
  
Vega turned to me.  
  
“How are the eggs?” I asked her.  
  
“Dunno, I’m not big on eggs. Everything else is good, though.”  
  
“They’re fine,” Hash huffed, frowning at a stubborn grease stain.  
  
“Two over easy, then.”  
  
“And some sausage and bacon, too,” Vega added.  
  
Instead of writing our orders down or getting started on them just yet, Hash simply nodded. “Picture?”  
  
I looked to Vega, who directed my attention to the photos on the wall. Looking closer, they were pictures of various capes taken in the diner, more than half of whom I recognized, though nearly as many eluded me. Miss Militia and Armsmaster, looking far younger than in recent photos. Sere after his swearing in, in his updated costume. Prism after her transfer to Brockton. A woman in a welding mask talking to a boy made of metal.  
  
“Oh,” I said. “Maybe on our way out?”  
  
“Mm.”  
  
Vega seemed to take that as confirmation enough and dragged me over to the double doors. They led to a room maybe a third the size of the rest of the place, most of which was taken up by a polished wood table and matching chairs. The lights here were a little brighter and when Vega locked and closed the doors I couldn’t hear any of the sounds from the rest of the diner.  
  
The main feature of the room, though, was the picture hanging across from the door. Significantly bigger than the others, this one captured a somber, still moment between two capes that should never have been able to sit together and face each other peaceably. On the left, Challenger, before his disappearance, done up in his full knight-errant suit of armor, all shining silver and forest green accents and tabard. On the right, Marquis, former major crime lord and one of the first villains to be sent to Tartarus instead of the Birdcage, wearing black and white finery, an intricate mask of bone, and a passive smile. Neither looked particularly happy to be there but the subtle tensions in their postures weren’t quite the hostile sort.  
  
“This was in the nineties,” Vega explained, “when the Teeth hired the Slaughterhouse Nine to kill heroes. This meeting happened after the Nine got bored and went on a killing spree. Had to figure a way to drive them out together.”  
  
I nodded, knowing what she was talking about. I may not have been old enough to remember myself but a city never forgot its run-ins with the Slaughterhouse.  
  
“So, yeah,” she said, taking a seat. “Welcome to cape history. This place is one of the longest-standing neutral territories in the area. One of the last ones left, too.”  
  
I sat across from her and placed my backpack in the seat adjacent, not ready to tackle the implications of the picture just yet. Instead I asked, “What happened to the others?” I wasn’t actually that curious but I needed to keep the conversation going, keep it from veering towards talk of unmasking to each other as long as possible. If I was lucky, the food would burn and we could leave hungry but still amicable, or perhaps she’d get an urgent call and have to leave before we reached the point of no return. I wasn’t one to bank on longshots but I was rather literally backed into a corner.  
  
She sighed. “Part of it is that, these places are most important for when there’s a threat that calls for all hands, and ever since… you know.”  
  
I did.  
  
“So there hasn’t been as much need for them. Or there has, but it’s come in different forms, and when they’re sporadic and variable like that it’s harder to get people to accept they might have to eat near a dangerous supervillain, especially civilians. You can usually get them to put up with that for the sake of contingencies against known quantities, but hypothetical eventual A- and S-class threats don’t have the same ‘ _umph’_.  
  
“The other part of it is, everyone’s starting to get anxious about what’s going to happen now that the grace period is coming to a close. Capes are worried either the PRT or other capes will start going too far, targeting civ identities or breaking other rules, and places like these would be easy targets. Capes stop dropping by after patrols or jobs or whatever, customers leave because there’s no one to gawk at, the places sink.”  
  
“I never got the identity part in the first place,” I interjected, tilting my head. “As in, if they’ve arrested a villain, why don’t they release their names? I’d think it’d make it harder for them to pick up where they left off, if they escaped.”  
  
Her body language became animated and I could tell I’d touched on something important to her. “That’s part of why I asked you here to talk, actually.”  
  
“Not for the food?”  
  
“Both,” she said, gesturing dismissively. “I’m hitting all sorts of birds with this stone. Point is, you’re new, and I’m assuming you don’t have any other cape friends yet, so you need someone to teach you about the unwritten rules.”  
  
Under the table my hands were clasped, transferring oil between them in a nervous fidget. If there was a code of conduct for parahumans and I’d kept going out not knowing about it, I might’ve eventually gotten myself into trouble. Maybe I already had, though I figured my night would be going a lot worse if that had been the case. More than anything though I was angry with myself for not doing more research. It wasn't a very rational anger but that didn't help to lessen it.  
  
“There’s a lot if you list out specifics, but it breaks down to three things.” She rattled them off on her fingers. “One, no fucking around with or in neutral ground or truce periods, i.e. places like this or fights against the biggest bads. Two, no going too far, meaning no huge attacks on civilians, no really heinous stuff like sexual assault or mind control, and, if you can help it, no killing. And three-” and here she leaned in, voice lowering just enough to be noticeable “-you don’t  _ever_  go after the civ identity or family of other capes. It’s different if they’ve already broken the rules themselves; in those cases everyone else is supposed to come down on them like a ton of bricks, but otherwise? Off. Limits.”  
  
I had a follow-up question about the lattermost rule ready but thought better of it.  
  
She straightened up and continued. “I know some of this sounds like it puts unfair limits on the heroes but it goes both ways. If every cape had to worry about getting attacked out of costume twenty-four/seven, at best we'd all quietly go nuts and at worst we'd end up destroying half the country in pre-emptive war. The rules keep us steady enough to live day-to-day and to buckle down together when we have to.”  
  
I looked to the picture.  
  
“Yeah. Like that.”  
  
I stared at Challenger’s captured image. For a moment I wished his helmet didn't hide so much of his expression, that I could glean some insight as to how it felt for him to sit at that table. I wondered how much the gravity of the situation was stifling the animosity, if there were still things simmering under the surface he couldn't get rid of. The interest faded but my gaze lingered.  
  
“You've got something on your mind,” Vega said. “Don't worry, there's no dumb questions.”  
  
I considered the concerns on my tongue a moment before voicing them. “You're being awfully forthcoming with all of this. I get that it's important, and that I'm part of the not-team thing now, but… it just seems like a lot of lengths to go to for someone you just met. You don't know anything about me.”  
  
“It's really not a lot at all,” she said. “Trust me, I'd be here right now even if you weren't. And besides, I know enough to do this much.”  
  
I stiffened. “Like what?”  
  
“Like that you helped Rachel out and got her closer to trusting you in minutes than I managed in the first few days.” At my tilt of the head she added, “Bitch, that is. Don't worry, her identity’s public. Not well known, since she doesn't cause much trouble, but still. Something we relate on. So there's that, and then… well, even after I used my aura on you, you stuck around.” She shrugged. “Says enough for me.”  
  
Just as I opened my mouth to speak again a hard  _one, two_  knock on the doors interrupted. My heart leapt into my throat.  
  
“Ugh,  _finally._  I'm so hungry.” Vega rose to open them with a bit more haste than necessary, accepted a pair of plates and called, “You're a lifesaver, Hash!” to his back. She set one at her seat and one in front of me, closed and locked the door, and reseated herself.  
  
She flipped her hood back, revealing a tight, intricate-looking platinum blonde bun, and had both hands on her mask when she stopped. “Oh, wait, shit.” Her arms lowered to the table, tapping on the wood. “I knew I was forgetting something.” She took a breath. “So, listen. I've kind of been assuming you'd already figured out who I am.”  
  
 _Fuck_ , I thought.  _Here we go._ “Er, the aura sort of gave it away.”  
  
“Thought so.” She held up her hands. “And I'm fine with you knowing, I am, but you have to hear something first. Remember how I'm not supposed to cape again yet, not until I'm eighteen?”  
  
“I assumed you'd worked something out.” My voice nearly broke at the end but I passed it off with a small cough.  _It would probably go over well. She's been nice enough so far. A little overwhelming, but._  
  
“If by that you mean I found a way around it, then yeah.” She sighed. “There's a bunch of variations on the Alexandria package out there, but the differences between each can be totally obvious or something more subtle. For me the big one is my aura, and I spent a while learning to repress that. So when I'm Vega, as long as I keep a lid on that, I can be just another flying brute.”  
  
“And that works?”  _It would probably go over terribly. Disgust, distrust, maybe even spite. Disappointment comes in many packages._  
  
She made a vague gesticulation. “Sort of. There are some people that know and more that don't, but the thing is as long as I'm wearing the mask, the rules say they can't call me out on it. Which brings me to this.” A pause. “I could just pull my mask halfway up to eat, hold on to plausible deniability, but I  _want_  to unmask to you, if that's okay. It's…”  
  
She trailed off, struggling for the words, and I found it striking that she was doubting herself at all. She'd seemed so unerringly self-assured until just then.  
  
“...I haven't made many friends, these days. There's Rachel, and she's… fine, but I know she likes her dogs more than me, and she has a lot of dogs. You're quiet and shy, but you did right when it counted, and hanging out like this has been nice. I think that's worth going out on a bit of a limb for.”  
  
I didn't know what to say.  
  
She brought her hands back to her mask, held them there for a moment, then pulled it up and off her head and set it down on the table, off to the side.  
  
The first detail that stood out to me was in her eyes; they were a paler blue than they appeared in photos on cape sites. Most of those had been from old shoots with New Wave, so I'd only ever seen her smile in static, big and brash, her pearly teeth on display. To watch her lips curl up without parting almost made me think there was someone else sitting across from me, though it carried the same undercurrent of bright sincerity.  
  
“Victoria Dallon. Nice to meet you.”  
  
I hesitated.  
  
Her brows rose. “Oh, you don't have to reciprocate if you don't want to. I can look away if you want to eat, or head out when I'm done with mine, so-”  
  
“No, I just-” My teeth ground my lip, breath thick and wet in my chest. A twitch of thought retracted the oil on my arms and head, and I pressed my hands to my hairline and dragged them back, retrieving most of the oil in my curls through my palms and scalp. I then reached over to my backpack, pulled out my glasses, and started to turn them over in nervous fingers, restless, before setting them in front of me. “I have to tell you something.”  
  
The goggles came off first, leaving my vision blurry. The facemask came second. I could have just pulled it down instead of taking it off all the way, but I was already on edge and without my face stretching the fabric it'd be too tight around my neck, feel too much like hands, squeezing. Only after I replaced my glasses did I meet her eyes.  
  
“I'm Taylor Hebert, and… I'm trans.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“...Yeah.”  
  
Her eyes flickered, probably unconsciously, over my features. My face, a little long. My jaw, a bit angular. My chest, flat. My throat. I didn't yet blame her for it, it was something most did without thinking, but I went rigid regardless. “If that's a problem…”  
  
She  _startled_ , and rushed to say, “No! I mean, no, it's not a problem, I just, I've never known anyone who was, um, yeah, and so…” Her lips pressed together. “I might mess things up, sometimes. I probably  _will_ , once or twice, but if you're willing to put up with that?”  
  
After a beat, I nodded.  
  
Her smile widened, just a fraction crooked. Human. “Then I'm willing to learn.”  
  
A quiet spanned between us. My eyes searched her expression. Hers met mine. I smiled back.  
  
She cleared her throat and picked up her fork. “Well, let's get at all this before it's cold, yeah?”  
  
I mirrored her, happy to move on, and started in on the eggs.  
  
“Actually, hold up.”  
  
My fork hovered in front of my mouth. A shot of worry ran through me.  
  
“Before you fill up on those, try the hash browns. Seriously, they're mind-blowing.”  
  
My heart sagged in relief. I laughed a little. “Fine.” I scooped up a forkful and sent it down the hatch. It was bolder than I'd been ready for, with a healthy amount of spice and maybe a hint of garlic, too, but the surprise was a pleasant one. I swallowed. “Hm. Not bad.”  
  
Victoria rolled her eyes. “‘Not bad,’ she says.” There was good humor in them.  
  
 _Yeah,_ I thought, trying a bite of both browns and egg.  _Not bad._


	7. Interlude 1

_incident 00526  
bne inprog 1173 roland av  
e88 suspected, no capes sighted  
shots fired_  
  
Victoria pocketed her phone. Not exactly what the doctor ordered. She and Rachel had been running low on funds before tonight, and now they had yet more dogs to care for. That meant they needed more food, more medicine, more toys and beds, and more gas for the generators. Mom had been tapering her allowance enough to matter and beating up gang members didn’t pay for supplies the way busting their stash houses and drug ops did. Still, one must carry water and chop wood and all that, and knocking Nazis to the pavement was fulfilling work. She lifted off from the corner where she and Taylor had parted ways and followed a loose course towards the south edge of the city.  
  
Taylor had turned out to be a pleasant surprise, though Victoria wasn’t sure if the emphasis there was on ‘pleasant’ or ‘surprise’. She was about as reserved as Rachel and only barely said more, but she could actually keep a conversation going with it and seemed content to let Victoria ramble from time to time. Plus, she’d seen to Rachel’s leg while the fighting was still happening, so she either kept a level head or did an admirable job of faking it. And even if she was as resilient as she believed, it said a lot that she’d jumped in to fight Fenrir in the first place.  
  
Victoria wasn’t so short-sighted as to miss that the girl was a bundle of issues, though. Most capes were, sure, but if gender complications had been the sum of hers, she wouldn’t have reacted to Victoria’s aura the way she had. There’d been a particular sort of defiance in her posture up against that warehouse wall, something cold and vindictive undercutting the base terror. Victoria knew that, prior to making the connection between her powers and identity, Taylor’s instincts had categorized her as a surrogate tormentor. She’d watched herself do something similar enough times to recognize it.  
  
As the tight urban grid of downtown gave way to imitation suburbia’s awkward sprawl beneath her, she hoped for less days worrying about making hidden ends meet and more chances to unwind and do what she did best. A new ally would open up opportunities to take on the scum of the bay, and a new friend could help stave off the weight of loneliness. All she had to do was make sure her own ignorance didn't drive Taylor away.  
  
The west-most houses, those closest to the new industrial areas, were smaller, simpler than the others. Older too, though not so aged as to be called historical. Just enough that they switched hands more by inheritance than by sale. Single-story, faded paint, loose shrubbery, patches of brown here and there on the strips of lawn. Typically, this was one of the quieter parts of Brockton, an easy fly-by on the way to patrol Empire territory.  
  
Not so, tonight.  
  
The sound of a gunshot saved her the trouble of checking house numbers. She closed in on one with a sedan in the driveway and a pickup peeling off the lawn, its flat rear tire slapping the pavement. A middle-aged man in a robe with dark skin and a shotgun strode out the busted-in door and loosed another shot, this time denting the bumper. “Not here!” He shouted, lowering the gun. “Not now, not ever!”  
  
That was all the confirmation she needed. She swooped down to street level and caught up to the truck. With a crushing grip on the bumper she pulled back, arresting its momentum. She caught the eyes of three rattled Empire mooks through the rear window and wished they could see her grin behind the mask. The one driving tried to swerve her off but found he no longer had the speed to. She lifted the back end off the ground and brought the whole thing to a halt. The intact tire spun uselessly while the other flopped to about as much effect.  
  
“So,” she called over the engine’s growl, “do you want to get out now, or do I have to shake you all out of there like the last racist chips in the bag?”  
  
“Fuck off, cunt,” replied the gentleman in the passenger seat. “This’s none of your fucking business!”  
  
Happy to oblige their enthusiasm, she yanked the back end higher. The Nazis, having evidently ignored proper road safety considerations in their rush to leave, were thrown forward out of their seats. The driver hit the horn with his torso, and as though cued the three scrambled out of the front end. One made a run for it, clutching a broken arm. Another tried, though his limp hindered his success.  
  
The driver, though, he got brave. He whipped a pistol out from his military surplus jacket and managed to fit one pull of the trigger in the span between her dropping the truck and her careening fist-first into his jaw. The shot shattered her forcefield so she had to manage the punch on her own cultivated strength. His teeth skinned her knuckles. She bit back a grunt at the sting and caught his gun arm before he could attempt a close-quarters shot. Her forcefield returned and, with a flight-assisted toss, she threw him into the limping guy. The two collapsed into a heap.  
  
The handgun clattered onto the street. She scooped it up, engaged the safety and wedged it into the back of her jeans. A temporary solution.  
  
She turned her sights on piece of shit number three, who was hobbling around a street corner. A moment of flight undid all his efforts in fleeing and she knocked him to the sidewalk. He tried to break his fall but yelped in pain from his injured arm, crumpling and rolling onto his back.  
  
She stood over him, lowering to the ground so that, from his angle, the streetlight above and behind her shone just over her head. Satisfaction swelled in her chest as his eyes widened. Even without her aura at her disposal she still knew how to inspire awe.  
  
“L-listen,” he said, holding up his good hand as if it'd stop anything, “I don't, I didn't want to do this, okay? Please- I just need the money! My family's broke, you know? What was I supposed to do?”  
  
Looming over him now, she could see the youth in his features, contextualize the cracks in his voice. He was closer to her age than the rest, a year or two younger, with thin brown hair and an attempt at a goatee that was shitty even for a teenager. Had he picked any other path, maybe even if he'd joined the Chosen instead, she might have pitied him.  
  
Her foot pinned his bad arm to the ground, eliciting a cry. “Not this.”  
  
“Wait!” he begged. He looked to his downed buddies up the street, then lowered his voice to a hiss. “I can tell you things! I-” He bit his lip and writhed a bit. “ _Fuck!_  They won’t tell me much yet but- but I know there’s something going down next week! Thursday!”  
  
“I know,” she lied, pressing down a little harder. “Now tell me something I don’t or we find out how much pain you can take before passing out.”  
  
He choked on a scream. “ _Ghh!_  Ah! Purity! She's gonna be there, and Crusader too, and that uh, that guy, the one with the radio show?”  
  
She frowned.  _Radio show?_  “Which one?”  
  
“ _The_  one, man! The-” He snapped his fingers. “Clint! Clint something, starts with a B. You know!”  
  
She didn't, but he'd given her enough to find out on her own. Asking for more would probably give away that she didn't actually have access to insider info. “Alright. Anything else?”  
  
He hesitated.  
  
She shrugged and leaned over to pick him up by the armpits. “Then we're done here.”  
  
He panicked - “Wait, no! I heard from a guy, uh, my… brother?” - but shut up when all she did was ziptie his wrists and ankles together. He whimpered when she tightened the one binding his injured arm but screwed his lips tighter as she dragged him over to his half-conscious friends.  
  
As she tied up the other two she heard footsteps approach. When she'd finished she looked up, first at all the neighbors catching sly peeks through their blinds, then at the man in a robe and slippers walking up to her. He had his shotgun lowered by his hip, swinging with his arm as he went, eyes on the bound Nazis even as she met him halfway.  
  
“That all you gonna do with ‘em?” His voice was scratchy, though not quite rough.  
  
She looked back to them. “Yeah. Someone already called this in. The police will take it from here.”  
  
He clucked his tongue. “And you believe that, when you say it?”  
  
She didn't. The police presence in Brockton had been ineffectual at best for as long as she could remember. Longer than that, too, she was sure; the villain rush of the late eighties, early nineties proved as much. She didn’t share Rachel's outright disdain for them but her baseline expectations were still pretty low. “This is as much as anyone can do without getting into trouble themselves. The rest isn't up to me, or you.”  
  
“Fifty-fifty chance for each one they get out in a day. BBPD’s full of ‘em, rats and sympathizers. Kid with the break’s got an even better shot, going to the hospital for that arm. Home free by tonight, no doubt, no doubt…” He petered out into a mutter.  
  
She didn't have a response.  
  
His grip on the gun tightened. “There'll be more, you know. It's numbers that let them do how they do. More’ll come, try to drive me out.”  
  
“Is moving an option?” she ventured.  
  
He grit his teeth, face screwed up like she'd offered him a warm glass of sewage. “My father worked half his life away to buy that home. I spent most my life living in it. My kids grew up there. My wife died, there.” The shotgun’s barrel made a clicking noise as he tapped the end on the ground. “No, it's not an option.”  
  
The man’s pride in his sense of family was sturdy. She wished she could empathize. “If they send more while I'm on patrol and someone calls it in, I'll come as fast as I can. That's all I can promise.”  
  
He worked the inside of his cheek between his teeth, then shook his head and started back toward his home.  
  
She watched him step over the prone corpse of his front door before propping it up in a semblance of security. She sighed, then lifted into the air, drifting towards the heart of the bay.  
  
It was a fortunate thing that she could still cape, but she missed being able to feel the wind in her hair.  
  
While the world went by beneath her she turned what she'd learned over in her mind. Purity, at least one of her lieutenants… and a radio show host? That wasn't exactly a combination that spelled ‘coordinated strikes’ but she also doubted they were planning a simple racists’ brunch. A strategy meeting, then? A recruitment drive, or maybe a rally?  
  
Whatever the event itself might be, though, it was the timing that most unsettled her. Next Thursday was the fifteenth of September, a date recognized nationwide - if not  _worldwide_  - as an annual period of armistice among capes. It’d been over a decade now since Behemoth and Leviathan ceased their campaign of devastation. Since Scion, the first parahuman, disappeared, never to be seen again. And by next Thursday?  
  
Eleven years to the day since the murder of Eidolon.  
  
Breaking that truce would be tantamount to flaunting the unwritten rules. Best-case scenario, the Empire were planning to take advantage of it to bolster their image when no one was allowed to interfere. Worst-case, they meant to shatter the precedent for a territory grab or a fight with added advantage, which would inevitably bring war down on their heads and turn her home into a battleground.  
  
For now though, it was standing, as intact as it’d ever been. Info gathering would have to wait until tomorrow; the fatigue of a long day was creeping over her, gumming up her muscles and thoughts. Her knuckles still stung, reminding her she’d have to clean up the cuts by the morning if she didn’t want to give everyone at school another reason to be afraid of her.  
  
She was far above the city now, losing herself in the calm of the sky. When she was this high up, there were no gangs to be seen, no PRT squads harassing independents, no strangers gawking at her until she looked their way. If she unfocused her eyes and let go of up and down she could see the night sky reflected in the city, its dark spread punctuated by artificial stars. She could turn slow, like a lazy gyroscope, and lose track of which was which until there was no ground left to fall to. It was what she thought peace must be like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eventually, the blood rush to her head got to be too much and she had to right herself, recovering her sense of axes. Her phone case had a cinching wrist strap attached to it and she made sure it was secure before pulling her phone all the way out of her jacket pocket, the one she didn't keep zipties in. Two more texts from her ex’s secondary number.  
  
 _incident 00527  
gang conflict at ryder and crenshaw  
chosen v runners, duneyrr sighted  
shots fired, powers used_  
  
 _00527 resolved_  
  
Notifications from whatever system Dean had set up for her were a small, bittersweet comfort. They were well and broken up, had been for the better part of a year, but he still cared enough to keep this going. It was almost like getting an actual message from him.  
  
She checked for anything from a new number. Nothing yet. She didn't think much of it. Taylor was probably still on her way home, or would hit her up in the morning.  
  
Her bookmarked news sites wouldn't update until the morning so she opened PHO. One new thread speculating on which mundane celebrity was secretly a cape. Another breaking down every little difference between Aegis’ costume as a Ward and his new one as a member of the Protectorate. A poster bumping a bunch of threads about Case 53’s, mining for any info. And one-  
  
One thread on proposed legislation further restricting rogues, with a few vocal anti-cape posters from some new movement clogging discussion. Her finger hovered over the link, already constructing her arguments.  
  
No. Today had been a good day, for once. She wouldn't be the one to ruin it right at the end. Her phone returned to her pocket, wrist strap and all, and she zipped it closed. She started towards the ocean, starless and void in contrast to the rest of the night.  
  
The handgun she'd confiscated found its way into her grip, let its safety switch off, aimed its barrel at the border on the horizon between night and nothing. It wanted to fire, itched to bring the hammer down just to  _do it_.  
  
She tossed it away. It fell past view and was gone.  
  
Her thoughts were tepid as she flew home, preferable to what she could have been thinking about.  
  
The lights were on in the living room when she arrived, giving the windows a faint glow around the curtains. Disappointing, but not unexpected. She hovered around the side to her bedroom window.  
  
Locked. She swore. Mom could be so petty sometimes. She lowered her hood and removed her mask, placing it on the lip of the roof to be collected after she got inside, then went back around to the front door.  
  
Mom was at the coffee table, sipping tea from a mug and marking her way through a stack of legal documentation with a pen from her office. She didn't even look up as Victoria entered. “It's late.”  
  
“Yeah.” She trod over to the kitchen area, grabbing a glass from a cupboard.  
  
“It's not healthy for you to stay out like this on a school night. I don't want you coming up with excuses if your grades suffer for it.”  
  
The ice dispenser in the fridge was taking too long. She opted to take her chances with merely cool water. “They won't.”  
  
She had to turn back towards Mom to get to the stairs and made eye contact with her. She almost looked like she was going to say something. Victoria wished she would.  
  
Mom went back to her papers. “Good. Get some rest, Victoria.”  
  
She climbed the stairs without her powers. She didn't feel much like flying anymore.  
  
Mom knew what Victoria was going out to do. Little moments like these proved it, where she'd poke around the topic or force it to come up somehow, but she never did anything about it. Victoria felt like she was trying to fall asleep but someone kept tapping her on the shoulder whenever her head dipped. The comparison described much of her current relationship with her mother, now that she thought of it.  
  
She locked her bedroom door and slumped against it, sipping her water. She knew she wasn't helping matters, maintaining her end of this tug-of-war. But how could she do anything else, when the house she'd spent her life in had become a shell? Of course they were at odds with each other, they were the only two left. There was no one there to mitigate their spats anymore, no one to help Victoria see things from a new perspective, no one to wrap her in a bear hug when she needed to calm down.  
  
The most gut-wrenching thing about it all was how little it seemed to affect Mom. Victoria would never forget that she hadn’t cried at the funeral, that every rare visit to his grave after seemed a chore in her eyes.  
  
She’d never forget that, when she’d been beating her father’s killer comatose, Mom hadn’t lifted a finger to help her do it.


	8. 2.1 Strike

**EYES ON THE GRASS**

**Keep the Snake at bay!**

 

Having grown up in a city infamous for its pervasive gang presences, I considered myself decently well-attuned to the associated jargons. I wouldn't be able to pose as a member of either major power for more than a short conversation, but I knew enough to recognize it when I heard it, to categorize based on common themes.

This sticker, however, puzzled me. It was pasted onto a streetlight, high enough to be beyond the reach of the average passerby but still readable from the sidewalk. The pole was on a street along my usual route and I couldn't remember seeing it yesterday morning, so it had to be new. The grass part could stem from the concept of 'blood and soil', which would indicate the Empire. On the other hand, Norse mythology featured a number of obscure tales surrounding animals in some way or another, so the snake aspect might suggest the Chosen. Both connections felt flimsy, though, so I reluctantly accepted my own ignorance and reached up to peel it off, just in case it was meant to incite trouble.

Something bit into my fingers and I hissed, snatching my hand back more out of instinct than actual pain. The half-peeled sticker curled back, revealing a razor blaze hidden in the middle. I scowled, thankful the dawn was still dim and there was no one around to see the oil in my cuts congeal and smooth over. Despite there being no need, I stayed mindful of the edges as I finished the job and delivered it post-free to the nearest house's trash bin.

The front steps of my own home greeted me at the end of the run and I skipped one on my way in. The savory aroma of bacon drew me to the kitchen. I nabbed a piece from the plate on the counter before heading up the stairs, fanning myself by the collar of my baggy sweats. I was almost at the second story landing when Dad popped out of the bathroom, dressed for work and smelling of aftershave.

"Oh, hey bud, wasn't sure I'd catch you before I left. Your run doesn't usually take so long. You add a block or two for the challenge?"

No, I was just worn out from fighting a ruthless gang boss and running from cops the night before. "Yeah, thought I could step it up."

"Attaboy." He ruffled my hair, grinning. "Got anything fun going on today?"

I shrugged. Charlotte would be helping her grandfather with his shop after school, and as well as I'd gotten on with Victoria, I doubted she wanted me to pester her less than a day after we'd met. "Not really. I'll probably just be here doing homework. How about you?"

His grin turned grimace. "Nothing but."

I cocked a brow. "Trouble in paradise?"

"Just some Empire recruiters getting pushy. We'll have them out of our hair in a day or two of coordinating, but you hate to see even a few guys stop to hear them out." He 'tsk'ed. "I know I don't need to tell you not to listen to a Nazi, but if you can help it, don't let them talk at all. Someone else might hear what they're selling and start to buy in."

"I'll be sure to punch a skinhead if I get the chance."

"Make your pops proud," he said, clapping me on the shoulder and passing me down the stairs. "And if you ever want to drop by and learn more about the job, you know where to find me."

Once he was out the door I rolled my eyes and headed into the bathroom. I held appreciation for what he did for a living, sure, but I wasn't keen on following in his footsteps the way he sometimes seemed to hope I would. Mom had once called dockwork, "Fine work for fine men but far less kind to women," and I was inclined to agree.

Showers were gauntlets of composure now, a series of little hygienic trials where losing my cool could spell disaster. Insecurity stalked like a highwayman in the brush, ready to plunge the honed edge of self-loathing into my back if I began to fixate on my body. Each second I let my guard down would cut deeper, bleed me faster, and if I faltered too long I might lose form entirely and be washed down the drain. I didn't know what exactly would happen if I had to feel my way out of our pipe system. I doubted it would be pleasant.

The steam and my suboptimal vision helped blur the visual pitfalls, but what really kept me together was my haircare routine. I spent most of my time in the shower treating and fussing over my curls, relishing the way they spilled past my clavicles when wet. They were my closest connection to Mom and everything she meant to me, more intrinsic even than my musical abilities or appreciation for literature, equal parts inheritance and cultivation given tactile form. No one could smear what that meant to me, not anymore.

Once I was out, dry, and dressed I settled my glasses back onto my face and drew my bedroom window's blinds open. The pale blue-gray of early autumn greeted me, drizzled in thin, wispy clouds and garnished with yellowing trees, and for the first time in a long while I found the view inviting. Despite being the same view I'd woken to my whole life, it felt different in some intangible way, and I wondered just how long this honeymoon phase with new purpose would actually last.

There was nothing for it but to go and find out. I shrugged my hoodie on, retrieved my backpack and flute case from the living room, locked the front door behind me and waded into the new day.

 

~

 

"The Parahuman Registration and Oversight bill, which you all have probably heard referred to as PRO-Act. It's not actually an act yet, since it's only been proposed for now, but that's the name that caught on, so. What do we know about it?"

Mrs. Fulmer's tired eyes scanned the meager offering of hands, to which I'd failed to contribute. I probably knew more than most in the room, considering I had damn good reason to keep tabs on such movements, but habit held my tongue. The best attention was no attention, after all.

The first kid she singled out was Caroline Something-Or-Other, who was under the dual delusions that one, a pedigree boasting Winslow  _wouldn't_  smother the career of an aspiring political figure in its crib, and two, the classroom  _was_  the best place to start practicing for her surely lucrative future. "PRO-Act is a state bill that would require all non-villain parahumans, hero or rogue, to register with the PRT and comply with their regulations. Additionally, it would criminalize the unauthorized use of powers for anything besides self-defence."

Her artificially chipper tone broke like a wave against the looming cliffs of Mrs. Fulmer's indifference and left it unmarked. "Mhm. What else?"

"It's probably not gonna pass," offered a boy with a limp faux hawk. His name may have been Mark. It might have been anything else, too.

"Speculation, not information, but no, probably not. Can anyone tell me who the biggest proponents are?"

The rest of the hands went down after that, so she targeted one of the indistinguishable stoners huddled in the far corner. "Uh, the… House of Representatives?"

Mrs. Fulmer, long numbed to such stunning displays of insight, didn't even sigh. "It was proposed in the House, but the ideas behind it were pushed by a specific organization. Who knows which one? Anyone?"

When no one else raised their hand, I reluctantly lifted mine.

A flicker of surprise crossed Mrs. Fulmer's face - the first emotion she'd shown all day - before she called on me.

I ignored the weight of the others' attentions as best I could. Most had probably forgotten I even sat here, secluded by the windows as I was. "The Common Guard. They're an anti-cape group."

She nodded. "Correct, although they wouldn't refer to themselves as such." After a look at the clock, she continued. "Now, with the ten minutes we've got left, split into groups of three and discuss the effects this would have on a local level if it passed." She waved us all on before trudging over to her desk to review papers from other classes.

The room stirred into conversation with minimal shifting around, as most students were seated by their friends to begin with. Charlotte wasn't in this class so I had no such safety net. Instead I got lumped together with Sparky, because I knew him from concert band, and Greg, because no one else would have him.

To say I knew Sparky may have been too generous an assessment. I was a flute and he was in percussion, so we were about as far apart in both seating arrangement and micro-microculture as two band students could be. Whatever respect he might have had for our mutual musicianship was overshadowed by the fact that I was a 'boy' who played flute, which was so heinous a betrayal of masculinity he hardly acknowledged my existence even when sitting next to me.

Greg, on the other hand, was happy to ramble to one of the few people who wouldn't outright shoot him down. "...and it's got this whole complicated system of randomly generated mob spawns, so the areas feel different every time. It's super cool, I've been sinking more hours into it than Blue Neptune, and I  _never_  thought I'd say that. There's also-"

"I know Mrs. Fulmer doesn't care," I interjected, "but shouldn't we at least talk about PRO-Act a little?"

Sparky seemed relieved I'd corked Greg's enthusiasm for the moment, though not enough to shoot me so much as a thankful glance, or even look up from his poorly-hidden phone at all. "I mean, it'd be cool if it did pass, I guess. Bet cape insurance would cost way less."

Greg mirrored my disbelief, though any hope his reasons reflected mine were quickly dashed. "Dude, what?! There's no way having a list of every cape is a good idea. Can you imagine what would happen if the CUI got their hands on that? They'd be picking off even more of our capes than they already are!"

"That's, like, 'Scion controlled the Endbringers' level conspiracy shit. Sorry I care more about my house not getting wrecked in a cape fight than the fuckin' Chinese boogeyman."

"But what about the effect on capes?" I asked, incredulous that I even had to argue the point. "You don't think it's messed up to forbid them from using their powers unless they conform to non-powered peoples' ideas of what a cape should be?"

Sparky rolled his eyes before returning them to his phone. "Nope. I mean, lots of shit's got special laws. If anyone's gonna get more I'm cool with it being the guys that puke lasers or whatever."

"The PRT regulations are absurd, though," I pressed. "Have you read them? Registered independents aren't allowed to do  _anything_  without a bunch of evaluations and licenses, all of which they have to pay for out of pocket. There are barely any rogues left that haven't been fined out of business. The only reason the Protectorate gets to do anything is because they report to the local Directors, which lets them bypass approval requirements. And even then, some of their capes are quitting because they keep rolling back what they're allowed to do."

If Sparky was anything but bored, he had a funny way of showing it. "Okay. I still don't give a fuck. It's not like anyone I know has powers, so all it means is things are safer. I'm cool with that."

My eyes narrowed. "Isn't the whole point of capes that anyone could be one? This could directly affect a friend or family member, and you might not even know it."

"It's one in a million or something, so no, not really." He finally met my glare. "Why are you so worked up about it, anyways? It's probably not gonna pass in the first place."

His total indifference struck a bubbling core of indignance in my gut. Peoples' very livelihoods were being targeted under the guise of security. We were those who'd suffered so deeply it'd manifested physically, and the shrinking fraction of us wanting to remedy the world instead of exact vengeance on it were at risk of losing our ability to do so in any meaningful way. But that was a distant thing to him, so far from his own little world that he would sell us for snake oil and feel nothing about it.

I looked to Greg for any sort of backup and realized he'd stopped listening and started sulking after Sparky had called him on his paranoia. That he could afford to tune out over so little rankled me.

I spared a last-ditch glance around the rest of the class, as though someone may have heard us and be waiting for a tag in, but no. In fact, it seemed maybe one or two groups were even talking about PRO-Act at all. I'd known passively that I was likely the only one directly affected by it, but now, being confronted by just how little it mattered to them, I felt like I was sinking in the realization, drowning in it.

Suddenly, I was very alone in a crowded room.

"Whatever. Let's just chill until the period's up." Without waiting for a response I flipped my hoodie up, folded my arms on my desk and buried my head in them.

When the bell rang I was the last one out the door, only managing to swallow my festering arguments when there was no one around to spew them to. The halls swallowed me in turn, the flow of students dragging me in the general direction of the south end in a daze. Their chatter was babble, their worries were shallow, and my jaw clenched knowing most of them would never know just what it meant to trigger, to stagger out of hell and still smell sulfur wherever you walked. I was so lost in resentment it took me a moment to register when someone shoulder checked me.

Sophia watched me stumble, ready to remind me of my place in our fucked up dynamic once I recovered my footing, but instead she cocked a brow. "What pissed in your punch today, Hebert?"

My glower must have been fierce to have caught her off guard, but for the moment I was too stunned to consider it. Here, right in front of me, was one of the only people in Winslow - probably  _the_  only one - that could relate to what I was feeling, whose insides burned and twisted with the memory of just how unjust the world was. She'd had her own nightmares brought to life, understood what it was like to carry the most bittersweet reward-slash-reminder wherever she went.

And yet, she'd still found it in her to pass the favor on to me.

"Fuck. Off. I'm not in the mood today." I barely bit the words out, nearly gurgling with half-bridled hate, and stomped off, ignoring the way she watched me go with narrowed eyes. I truly despised her then, that she could so callously reflect the evil that'd scarred her. I hated myself, too, for imagining any solidarity between us, even in a moment of weakness. There had to be something wrong with me, something at least Stockholm-adjacent.

To add the terrible cherry to my bad mood sundae, when I got to the spot I where Charlotte and I usually met up before heading to band, she was nowhere to be found. She'd probably gone on ahead when I'd not turned up on time. I berated myself and started towards my locker.

On the way, though, something caught my eye, and a subtle unease tickled at the nape of my neck. The southeast stairwell was one of those spots even the teachers avoided, because no matter which gang had the upper hand at the time, it was always  _someone's_  territory. Seeing the door stand open even a crack was a red flag. Hearing the scuffle of shoes on tile and clothes rustling from within was as final a warning as you could get. I should have just walked on by like everyone else, but the itch of disquiet swelled at the thought. I took cover on the wall just by the door and strained my ears through the harsh echoes.

The first voice I heard was a thin but steady tenor. "-your little friend now, huh? Prolly too busy suckin' dick to protect you, huh?"

The second was a little lower, more tenuous, almost hissing. "Fuck! Get her fucking arm, she's got nails like- like nails!"

"C'mon, you're gonna have to get closer to really mess her up. My dad was the one who got you out last night, so if you wanna repay us for that I need to see more than a couple bruises." The first voice, again.

"Get-  _gah!_  -get the hell off me!"

Charlotte.

_Shit._

I burst through the door. The echoing bang it made when it hit the beat-up rubber doorstop gave pause to the commotion. On the landing between this floor and the next one up stood four pale assholes wearing more red and black than anything else. Of the four, one was holding a folding knife out to another with his arm in a cast, covered in illegible signatures. The other two were holding Charlotte tight by her biceps. All of them were now looking at me.

"Let her go or I swear you'll regret it." I growled.

The one holding out the knife turned to me instead, grinning like he'd just been served an extra helping of Thanksgiving dinner. "Well, well. How's that saying go? 'Speak of the faggot and he shall appear.'" The knife flicked open and he dragged it lazily through the air in a taunting flourish. "What say we  _really_  make my pops proud, huh?"


	9. 2.2 Strike

I started for the steps but froze when the guy with the knife held it up to Charlotte’s cheek. She went still suddenly, eyes wide and riveted to the blade, and my insides seethed.  
  
“Ah, ah, ah,” he admonished. Strands of his clean blond undercut flicked side to side as he shook his head. A smug grin split his cheeks, his teeth a bit crooked in a way that made them look enticingly fragile. “Try anything smart and your fag hag here is gonna get some marks she can't hide.”  
  
“Let her go, _now_ ,” I repeated.  
  
“Whoa, buddy!” He held his arms out, startling Charlotte and I as the knife glided past her face. “What's the rush? I don't know if you've ever seen that movie Ferris Bueller, but you could learn a thing or two. ‘Stop and look around, cuz life's going by,’ you know?”  
  
The lone girl of their group chimed in. “That doesn't really sound right.”  
  
The brick-shithouse-in-training on Charlotte’s other side grunted in agreement.  
  
Undercut leaned his head towards her but kept his eyes on me. “You ever seen Ferris Bueller? No? Then how the fuck would you know?” His annoyance filtered into the knife, making it bounce in his hand until he reassumed composure. “What I'm getting at is, if you wanna do the Jewess any favors, you're gonna have to sit tight with us a while. See, we were in the middle of something here, and the only way I see us changing plans is if _you_ -” he angled the blade down to point at me “-give us a good reason to.”  
  
Undercut was clearly comfortable with the knife. His showy little flourishes and deceptively loose grip on the handle spoke of experience, if not subtlety.  
  
In contrast, Cast didn't seem to be comfortable with any of this. His gaze darted between Undercut and myself, good hand scratching at his sad crop of facial hair. Were I an outsider to the situation I might have wondered what led him here, what tumbles and falls bruised his life so bad he'd turned to the _Nazis_ to patch it up, but that was a luxury my anger would not afford.  
  
I didn’t look to Charlotte. I knew that if I did, one way or another I'd lose my cool.  
  
Undercut frowned. “Listen man, I know I said don't rush, but you don't gotta dawdle either. Fresh meat here's got dues to pay and stripes to earn. Shit or get off the pot.”  
  
I bit back a scowl, though he probably saw it in my glare. Through no small amount of reluctance, I pulled up the sleeve of my hoodie and held a bare forearm out, palm up. “Make it look like I cut myself,” I said. “You'll get away with more.”  
  
The distress radiating off Charlotte was palpable but my eyes were locked with Undercut’s. His grin threatened to reach his ears. “Now I _know_ you're a fag, ‘cause you sure know how to please a guy. Newbie?” He flipped the knife around in his hand and held it out to Cast, almost absently. He never looked away from me. “Oblige him.”  
  
Cast hesitated. “Hold on, man, I- I get why the Jew deserves it, the businesses and all, I got that. But, uh… what's he got to do with any of it?”  
  
“If you listened like we do you'd know already,” said Undercut. “You remember that poof that made office in Washington - state, not D.C., ran his whole campaign around being open about it? Well, he just pushed through funding changes to burn more cash on those El-Bee-Gee-Tee center things. That's taxpayer money going to their agenda, see? And there's centers like that all over, taking money out of the pockets of honest families like yours and mine. There's one downtown, even. That's what we're up against out there. That's what's standing in front of us right here.” He pressed the handle into Cast’s good hand with finality.  
  
Cast looked down at me again, and I could see the sweet poison in Undercut’s words seep into his thoughts, watched as they congealed into resolve behind his eyes. His grip tightened around the handle and he started down the steps towards me.  
  
My jaw clenched around the truth, choked off counters and retorts. Having to stand down and watch the creation of a neo-Nazi grated against every moral fiber in me, but I wouldn't be the only one paying if I let my emotions get the best of me. So I stayed still, presenting my arm like a chicken with its neck out, and watched the farmer come down with his hatchet.  
  
He stopped a couple feet away from me, hesitating, then fixed his gaze on my arm and closed the gap. The knife hovered over my arm a moment, angled more like it was going to spread jam on me than cut me. I heard him draw a steadying breath and watched the blade approach my bare skin.  
  
I could bleed if I had to. It'd been one of the first things I'd tested about my powers, more out of necessity than foresight. If I ran the risk of outing myself every time I got a papercut I'd never have left the house in civs again. The trick was, I had to keep collected mentally to stay human beneath the surface. It was like a button I had to keep a finger on. Simple enough to keep up, but it only took one lapse to turn crimson to shimmering black. I liked to think I'd gotten good at maintaining it but preferred not to try my luck when I didn't need to. And if this went the way I hoped?  
  
I wouldn't need to.  
  
In a flash my proffered hand snapped up to grab Cast’s good arm. A hard pinch to the inside wrist forced a yelp from his lips and the knife from his hand. It clattered to the ground.  
  
Without thinking he brought his other arm up to claw at mine. A restrained smack to Cast’s cast elicited a second yelp, this one an octave higher. A follow-up jab to his solar plexus sent him sprawling to the ground, inches from the first stair up, gasping.  
  
“Wrong move, cocksucker.”  
  
That was all the warning I got as Undercut flung his full backpack down the stairs. I barely had time to bring my arms up to block before it crashed into me, knocking me to the tile. My own backpack broke my fall some, cushioned by my gym clothes, but the impact rattled my tailbone, making me hiss through my teeth. I heaved his bag off of me just as he reached the bottom of the steps, leaning over Cast’s crumpled form to retrieve the knife.  
  
“I told you what'd happen if you tried anything smart,” he said, straightening up. His scowl was contemptuous. “I'll give you points for having a little backbone, but you picked the wrong time to show it.” He turned to start back up the steps. “Now stay the fuck down and watch what it gets you.”  
  
Words spilled from my mouth before I even realized I was speaking. “I thought your type was all about earning your keep.”  
  
He huffed, but didn't stop. “Yeah, and?”  
  
I pushed myself up to my feet, suffering an awkward stagger as my pack skewed my balance. I'd already started talking; there'd be no backing down now. “Where's the work in hurting someone you've got pinned? Sounds a lot like taking a handout to me.”  
  
That got him to pause, halfway up to the landing. He glowered over his shoulder. “You don't know when to shut up, do you?”  
  
“I know when someone's taking the easy road,” I spat back. “I know a coward when I see one.”  
  
His features twisted into a sneer. “Big talk from the fairy who just downed an injured kid. Hope you know that if we weren't on school grounds I'd have you begging for your fucking life right now.”  
  
“If-” I swallowed. “If you really want your pound of flesh, then come back here and _take it_.” My eyes narrowed. “Or are you afraid you'll get beaten by the fairy?”  
  
He faced me, shoulders squared, and the success I felt was quickly replaced by a new kind of anxiety. I hadn't planned this far.  
  
“Fine,” he muttered as he rolled up his sleeves. “If this is what it takes to teach you your place.” He descended the steps with a languid calm that was, in addition to his searing glare, probably meant to intimidate me, or at least make me sweat. It might’ve, had I been paying it any mind.  
  
I was watching the knife.  
  
I hadn't worried much, facing Cast. He was too green to pose a real threat, even with a weapon in hand. Undercut, though? He'd had training, might've seen a _real_ fight or two, even at our age. Hand to hand, he would've pushed me to my limits, cornered me into resorting to the dirtiest moves I knew. With his knife to my nothing? I was running the very real risk of getting outed as a cape, and of everyone that could find out, the Empire would be the worst, hands-down.  
  
I swallowed that worry, sunk it down with the murk twisting in my gut and quashed it like I was making room in an over-full trash can. It wouldn’t do me any good. Instead I reached for everything I’d been taught, anything that’d help my chances in the here and now. My feet planted themselves firmly, just far enough apart to keep balanced and mobile. My torso angled to the side some to make me a smaller target. My arms came up in front of me, close to the body to better defend my vulnerabilities.  
  
Undercut strolled past Cast, who’d scooched up against the wall, holding his broken arm close. Undercut payed him no mind. He stopped just before me, sized up my stance and smirked, squint smoldering with hate. “Tell you what. ‘Cause I’m so nice, I’ll even let you get the first hit in. Only fair.” His free hand gestured to himself, inviting. “Make the most of it.”  
  
I hesitated a moment, but before I could overthink it leveled a testing punch towards his chest.  
  
In a flash the knife swiped up to meet my arm, and only by a jolt of bare instinct did I pull back in time. His followup was immediate and just as vicious, forcing me to backstep to keep out of his range. I preempted his next slash by aiming a kick at his knee. He managed to sidestep it, but it caused his blitz to falter. An attempt to take advantage by pinning his knife arm earned me an elbow to the face from his other arm and I retreated further.  
  
We watched each other a moment. He grinned again, and now it trespassed beyond pretense into something animalistic and self-satisfied. I began to feel wet stream from lip to chin, some ending up in my mouth. Panic rang my doorbell.  
  
_Oh thank god_ , I thought, tasting copper. _It’s only blood_.  
  
I put my split lip out of mind for the moment. Of more concern was the near-overwhelming itch in the back of my thoughts, needling me to forget consequence and just _use my power_. In the short term, it would turn the tables definitively in my favor. I could show him just how little he could hurt me, turn this stairwell into an oil well, _drown him in_ -  
  
But that wasn’t an option. With the ease of months of practice, I quelled the urge. He wasn't worth it. He was small fry. If I could make Fenrir bleed, I could take down some cocky Nazi punk. I just needed to focus; _think_.  
  
He tested the waters with a lunging stab, and I flinched away, body running on defensive autopilot. He was better trained, that much was obvious. There wasn’t much I could do about it either, barring a multitude of sudden insights into the nature of combat. I abandoned that line of thought.  
  
He tried to hook his free hand on the back of my neck to force me into closer quarters. I batted it away by the inside of his forearm. It occured to me that, despite his sturdier build, I had a good couple inches on him and a longer reach to match. That would be a significant advantage, if I could make use of it. The problem was-  
  
I nearly managed a blow to his chest but the knife came up to meet me again, forcing me to abort. His weapon was the key piece in this fight. It denied me the option of risk, as the tradeoff for getting a hit in would be much worse for me. It also gave him an inevitability of sorts, as he’d only need one or two successes to end things, one way or another. Worst of all it played on some very base instincts, inspiring shots of adrenal fear and aversion each time it came for me.  
  
In an odd moment of clarity, as our bodies stared one another down, I recognized just how little the blade could ever do to hurt me. Social consequences notwithstanding, he could cut me up until his arms got tired and, if I needed to, I’d simply pull myself back together, every time.  
  
From that understanding, a plan sprouted.  
  
“If you back down now,” Undercut said, tone dripping with bravado, “I’ll let you keep all your fingers. Promise.”  
  
I had to stop myself from smirking. Instead I rolled the dice on another body shot, crossing just into his reach to do so.  
  
He’d adapted to my defensive reflexes; as his knife swiped up to meet me, his free hand reached for my forearm.  
  
_Perfect_.  
  
My feint switched gears, my fist twisting to clamp down on his wrist. Ignoring the way my adrenaline screamed at the notion, I yanked his knife arm across his body and towards my own. The edge glided past my ear just as my knee met his crotch. Between the surprise and the pain he managed little resistance when I followed up with a kick to his shin. He stumbled forward into my fist and I felt as much as heard his nose break against my knuckles.  
  
Bloodied, he crumpled to the floor, the knife fell from his hand, and it was over.  
  
My fists clenched, nails digging into my palms, leftover tension wringing my veins. My breath came heavy, controlled. Someone cursed, dispelling the haze, and my eyes climbed the stairs.  
  
Charlotte was almost gaping, face pale, mouth hanging open a bit. Her focus drifted to my lip, which I realized was still bleeding. I wiped my chin on the sleeve of my hoodie.  
  
“Fuck this,” muttered the girl holding Charlotte’s arm. She let go, rounded the landing and bolted up to the next floor. The sound of the door above being flung open prompted the last Nazi standing to look to his fallen leader, then at Charlotte, then me. He followed her example.  
  
She watched him go, then picked up her backpack and clarinet case and hurried down the steps. She gave Undercut’s groaning form a wide berth and pinned Cast to the wall with a glare, then wrapped her arms around me and squeezed.  
  
“ _Thank you_.”  
  
I squeezed back. “Of course.”  
  
She pulled away and took a closer look at my lip. “Let’s get to the office. We can get you something for that there.”  
  
I nodded. It'd be best to report the fight before the Empire guys got the chance; the school wouldn't be able to ignore his weapon and broken nose and I'd rather they heard our side of the story first. I pocketed the knife so Undercut couldn't stash it and feign ignorance, then turned to the still-open door and froze.  
  
At the far end of the now-empty hall, leaned up against a locker, was Sophia. Her gaze was already on me, assessing. Her brow furrowed when we made eye contact.  
  
She'd been there the whole time, I realized- had followed me after I talked back to her, thought it'd meant I was up to something.  
  
She'd stood there and watched and done _nothing_.  
  
The bell rang, echoing harshly in the stairwell. Sophia pushed off from the locker, turned down the bend in the hall and disappeared from view.  
  
Charlotte had to tug on my sleeve to get me to move. The office was the other way. Not far. While walking I sucked on my bottom lip, to keep it from dripping. It didn't taste of copper anymore.

 

~

  
“He should've gotten expelled.”  
  
I didn't have to glance over to know Charlotte was squishing and kneading her backpack’s strap in her fist. She did it when there was a test in precalc, when her mom was being overbearing, when I'd tell her I was skipping out before gym. I'd suggested a stress ball to her once but she hadn't thought it necessary. She bought a new backpack every few months. Duct tape could only fix so much.  
  
“Just having the knife should've been enough. With- with everything else…” She licked her lips. “I don't understand how he got off with a two week suspension.”  
  
We passed through Winslow’s north exit and headed for our usual bench. The breeze had a bit more spirit to it compared to the morning, just enough now to whistle low when it danced through the trees. On another day, I might've appreciated it. My ziploc bag of ice shifted as it melted a bit more. I pressed it harder to my lip.  
  
“And then they turn around and make us go home for the day, like we did something wrong too.” She slumped onto the bench, placed her clarinet case on her lap and clicked it open. “I don't want to raise a stink about it. I don't think I have it in me. But I wish I did.”  
  
I sat next to her and set my flute case down on my other side, glad it'd been in my locker during the fight. “Anything broken?” My voice was muffled by the ice bag.  
  
She ran through a few scales with disparate amounts of sharps and flats before disassembling the instrument. “A few chipped reeds, but these ones were Ricos. The keys feel fine, so at least something worked out.” She set the case aside. “That's the only thing you've said since the office. You okay?”  
  
“My lip’s sore, is all.”  
  
Either she bought it or she was letting me keep up my front for the moment. I knew which was more likely. “I bet, he got you pretty good there. I'm still kind of shocked you beat him. Where did you learn-” She arched a brow. “Your dad?”  
  
“Yeah. He thought I should know the basics. For a dockworker that includes fighting dirty. It works for me- you don't need much muscle to go for the weak spots.”  
  
She hummed. “Makes sense.”  
  
Neither of us spoke for a little while. There wasn't much to be said. The silence wrapped around our shoulders and we huddled under it together. It was enough to not be alone. That was something Charlotte understood well. One of her best qualities, I thought.  
  
When the moment had passed she asked, voice gentle, “One of your dad's friends is picking us up, right?”  
  
I nodded. Dad was stuck dealing with something time-sensitive at work so he'd promised to get us a ride from someone else.  
  
“What car are we looking for?”  
  
“A blue hatchback with a dent in the bumper, if it's Kurt or Lacey. Otherwise…” My grip on the ice bag tightened. “That one. The silver sedan pulling in.”  
  
“Oh. Whose is that?”  
  
I rose to my feet, fighting the impulse to leave. “Alan’s.”  
  
She waited for me to elaborate. When I didn't she frowned, gathered her things and stood herself.  
  
For the scant few seconds it took us to get to the curb my mind was awhirl. There were so many unknowns here, and I had little choice but to high-dive into them. _How much does he know_ , I wondered. _Has Emma told him and Zoe about me? Do they know we're not friends anymore? Do they hate me? Do they know Emma’s new best friend is a monster?_ My fingers wrapped around the passenger door handle, hesitating.  
  
_Do they think_ I'm _a monster?_  
  
I opened the door.  
  
Alan Barnes wasn't in the driver's seat. Neither was Zoe Barnes. Instead…  
  
“Hey hey, Tay-Tay! Long time no see.”  
  
Arm draped casually over the wheel. Rocking a jean/flannel combo I'd kill to look half as good in. Smiling like no time had passed at all.  
  
Anne Barnes tucked a strand of silken gold behind her ear. She noticed my lip and gave me a wry look. “Let me guess: I should see the other guy.”


	10. 2.3 Strike

“You gonna get in or what?”  
  
I blinked. “Oh, um, yeah. Hey Anne.” I stuffed my backpack and flute case into the footroom beneath the glove box before settling into the seat. The interior was almost as clean as I remembered it and the seat’s cushioning may have been even comfier.  
  
“So you do remember my name,” she teased, leaning an arm on her own seat to twist around a bit. “And who's your friend here?”  
  
Charlotte, who'd just slid into the back and gotten her seatbelt on, gave a polite, slightly nervous smile. “Charlotte. I'm in band with Taylor. Nice to meet you.”  
  
Anne's easy grin in return was a lesson in contrasts. “Likewise. Now, where am I taking ya, Charlotte from band?”  
  
“It's, um… it's south for a while, and then east on Donovan for a bit.”  
  
“It's above the corner store with the weird imported sodas,” I added.  
  
“Mmhm. And, thank you for the ride.”  
  
“No problem.” Anne pulled away from the curb and took us into light street traffic. “Didn't know you were still in band,” she said to me. “Flute, right? My, ah, roommate plays oboe. You'd get along, unless there's some, like, inter-woodwind beef there I don't know about.”  
  
_Roommate, right, she's in college by now. Although…_ “I thought you wanted to go to UMD,” I blurted.  
  
“Still do. I'm taking classes at the junior college down on south coast, then transferring in after. Saves a lot of money and it's a little easier to get in this way, too.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
“Also, Dad doesn't pay attention to what I take like he would if I was already at UMD, so I can get some cape law classes in without him freaking out.”  
  
“Why would he be upset about that?” Charlotte asked.  
  
Anne tapped her finger on the wheel. “Well _supposedly_ , it's the most dangerous thing you can do with a law degree. Working with ‘volatile populations’, being part of cases that set huge precedents, risking being threatened by a cape or gang to tip things one way or the other, that sort of thing. Nevermind that mundane criminal law can put you in most of the same situations, and that you've got more to be scared of from a dude with a gun than a cape who's held to unwritten rules.” She sighed. “If Dad found out what I want to do he'd go off about me ending up like that Calle guy or something and I just don't want to deal with that yet.”  
  
At the next light the car slid into the left turn lane. After a moment the signal turned green and we started down Donovan.  
  
“Anyways. That's what's new on my end. How ‘bout you? I figure you're pretty busy with _something_ , considering we haven't even run into each other when I've visited the house.”  
  
I shifted in my seat. “Band stuff takes up a lot of time,” I deflected.  
  
“Sure, but I doubt that was what kept you from coming to the last two Christmas dinners.” Between watching the other cars and the lights she glanced at me, eyes searching without being piercing. It made her look a lot like her mom.  
  
My chest felt tight. I didn't respond.  
  
“We just miss you, is all.” She met my eyes. “Emma misses you.”  
  
I couldn't hide my wince. “Don't take this the wrong way, but I doubt it. She and I… aren't on the best terms these days.”  
  
Anne's eyebrows rose, but she didn't look as surprised as I'd thought she'd be. “Sorry, didn't know. Whatever’s up with you two, though, she does miss you. I can tell.”  
  
I felt Charlotte’s eyes branding questions into my scalp, but now wasn't the time. I watched the small shops go by. “I'll take your word for it.”  
  
“Did…” She paused, chewing on her words, and wasn't that an odd look on her? “Did it start about two years ago, sometime during the summer? Or was it something before that?”  
  
I gave her a quizzical look. “Uh, it started to go bad around then, but… it was something I think would have turned sour eventually. It's not something we could have avoided forever.”  
  
Something seemed to click in her head, though less in a ‘eureka’ way than a ‘some theory being validated’ way. It made me feel naked.  
  
From behind us, Charlotte cleared her throat. “It's, um, right here.”  
  
“Oh!” Anne laughed, dispelling the thickness in the air in an instant. “Sorry ‘bout that, I was just about to pass it by.” She pulled up to the curb, eyeing the small corner store, the bars in its windows, the neon signs of odd beer company logos glowing inside. “You really live above this place?”  
  
Charlotte shrugged her pack onto one shoulder, thumb hooked into its abused strap, and placed her clarinet case in her lap so she could open the door. “No, but my grandpa does. He runs a tailoring business out of it too, trades stitches for snacks with the guy that runs the store. I help out sometimes.”  
  
Anne nodded. “Sounds like a good gig.”  
  
“It is.” Before closing the door, she looked back at us, her eyes lingering on me, and added, “Thanks again, Taylor. And thank you for the ride! Again!”  
  
I gave her a tight smile that said, “I'll tell you later.”  
  
“Cool meetin’ ya!” Anne called back.  
  
She closed the car door and headed into a stairwell beside the corner store.  
  
Anne started us back on Donovan and stayed on it as it bent north-east. For a minute or two, the silence hung like a sheer curtain between us, a momentary veneer of privacy we both needed.  
  
She was the first to pull it back. “So you never explained how you got your lip busted.”  
  
I held back a sigh of relief. “Oh. Some Empire wannabes were going after Char.” At her questioning glance I added, “She's Jewish.”  
  
“Mm. Gotcha.”  
  
“One had a knife, and…” I swallowed, trying not to think about what they'd meant to do to my closest friend. “... and I fought them off. That's all.”  
  
“You took on multiple Nazilings, knife to fists, and came out the other end with just a busted lip?” She whistled. “Pretty kickass, Curly. City could do with more folks standing up like that. Might make it a decent place to live, then.”  
  
I felt very mildly patronized but it was hard not to enjoy a compliment from her. A touch of heat colored my cheeks. “They were just some small-time punks. I don't think I accomplished very much.”  
  
“Hey now, gangs are built on the backs of small-time punks, ‘specially gangs like the Empire. They get it in their heads that being part of something so big makes them unstoppable. Shake that confidence enough and the foundation starts to crumble.” She shrugged. “Sorry to get all criminology professor on you, but it's true. You did some tangible good today, even if it was small. It's more than most.”  
  
My hands clasped together in my lap as I digested her words. Not knowing how to respond to them directly, I shifted the subject a bit. “Is there a big Empire presence on the south coast? I don't go down there much.”  
  
Her hand waggled to say, _sort of_. “There's not many capes around- they're usually busy fighting the Chosen or trying to stop PRT raids. Sometimes a handful of skinheads comes around to harass people like they're trying to claim territory but it's not as bad as it is for the homes by the new industrials.” Her finger tapped the wheel again. “Mostly it's the shitheads who are off the ku-klux-klock or the closet sympathizers I have to deal with. Trying to pick me up because I'm white and blonde, or losing their shit when they find out I'm-”  
  
Her finger stopped tapping. The tip was flattened against the wheel, skin under the nail going white with the pressure, until she finally let up. “Anyways. Could be worse. Could be a lot worse.”  
  
I swallowed. “Still. I'm sorry you have to deal with that.”  
  
Her lips curled up weakly, and she gave mine a meaningful glance. “I'm not the only one.”  
  
The light in front of us turned red and Anne slowed to a halt just before the line. As the cars passed in front of us the curl in her lips wilted and drooped.  
  
“Listen,” she began, “I know it's been a while since we last saw each other, and if I'm overstepping my bounds let me know, but… it seems like Neonazis aren't the only big thing on your plate these days. You don't have to be ready now, but if you ever need to talk to someone, or if you want help working things out with Emma, my number hasn't changed.”  
  
She placed a hand on my shoulder and I leaned into it instinctively, overwhelmed by the gesture.  
  
“You're a great guy, Taylor, but more than that… you're family. And family…”  
  
I managed a wet chuckle. “...means nobody gets left behind.”  
  
Her eyes shone with mirth, and it was easy to see why she'd been the only girl I'd considered as much of a role model as my mom. “Or forgotten,” she chided, bopping my shoulder. “You always forget that part.”  
  
Had I not buckled my seatbelt, I might have floated out of the passenger seat, through the sunroof and up into the clouds- that's how light my body felt. It wasn't perfect, she'd only partially sussed out my situation, but unlike the rumors and jeers at school she was coming from a place of understanding, acceptance, maybe even solidarity. It shook me to my core.  
  
“At the very least,” she continued, tucking a strand that'd gotten loose behind her ear again, “hit me up when you turn eighteen so I can show you all the good bars and clubs we've got southside. That part's non-negotiable. You're not leaving Brockton until you've had a Blueberry Baywater, seen some genuine vogueing, and danced with someone cute.”  
  
“Eighteen isn't old enough to drink.” I paused. “You're not even twenty-one yet yourself.”  
  
She laughed. “Hasn't stopped me yet.”  
  
The light turned green. The car accelerated smoothly into motion, the small shops and apartments passed us by, and if Anne noticed the moisture welling in my eyes, she didn't mention it.  


~

  
Muffled squeaking greeted me before I was even halfway down the alley. The meat and bone from the night before was absent but it'd left a wretched smell in its wake, like the dumpster behind a butcher's shop. Rats scurried along the corners and edges of the path, and I'd first thought they'd been the source of the noise, but it only got louder as I approached the side door to the red-brick warehouse.  
  
“Fuck! Yes! That's fifty-four, baby!”  
  
“Whatever. Give it to me.”  
  
The chain was already off the door's rusty handles. I grabbed one, hesitated, then pushed through with a loud _creeeaaak_.  
  
Victoria and Rachel were at the dog end of the building past the machinery. Both were in civvies, loose cargo shorts and a t-shirt for Rachel, tight sport shorts and a tank top-sports bra combo for Victoria. Both were showing a lot of impressive muscle. Victoria especially surprised me; I hadn't thought a brute would necessarily need much mundane muscle, but hers were quite well-cultivated, particularly her biceps. Her hair was up in a tight ponytail, leaving her powerful shoulder muscles on full display, alternating between taut and relaxed as she moved.  
  
_Wow_.  
  
She stopped and turned to me first, her clean sneakers squeaking to a halt on the well-cleaned floor. This was opportunity enough for Rachel, who weaved past both her and all the dogs trying to get in on the fun. With a running jump she kicked up off the wall next to the hoop (the kind where you fill the base with water) and dunked it through the net so hard the whole thing tilted for a second before teetering back into place.  
  
She pumped a fist and pet a dog. “Three points.”  
  
Victoria, who'd first beamed at me and then frowned at my lip and ice bag, now frowned at Rachel. “Two.” She pointed to a chalk line drawn around the hoop. “It's only three if it's behind that.”  
  
“But it was cool,” Rachel growled. “ _Four_ points.”  
  
Victoria sighed. “Tell you what. It's four points if you go nab some drinks for the three of us.”  
  
Rachel's head whipped around and landed on me. She looked like she wanted to sic one or many dogs on me until her eyes caught on my hair. “You the one from last night?”  
  
“Yeah.” As proof, I held one hand over the other and let it dissolve into oil, which I caught, absorbed, and used to regrow it.  
  
She seemed to accept it. “Alright. You like Coke?”  
  
It was fine, but I preferred iced tea, or at least something lemon-lime. “What all do you have?”  
  
She turned and headed towards a mini-fridge set atop a piece of dilapidated machinery. “We have Coke.”  
  
Victoria met me in the middle of the floor, step pepful. “Hey, Taylor! Glad to see you back.” Her head tilted just a bit. “You doing alright? I thought you could regenerate.”  
  
“O-oh, I'm fine, just… if I stay solid when I get hit, I can't fix it up after the fact. Most of the time, at least.” I started to feel silly, standing in front of this glistening fitness goddess in a hoodie and jeans, clutching a bag of ice. “I, um, didn't know you guys played basketball.”  
  
“Oh, yeah I've been teaching Rach. We're still working on the whole dribbling thing but I like to think we're making progress.” Hope bubbled up in her eyes. “You wouldn't happen to play yourself, would you?”  
  
“No, sorry. I was never very good at sports.” Running, maybe, but joining the track team wasn't an option for a lot of reasons.  
  
“Ah well.”  
  
Rachel came back with three cold cans, herself accented by sweat, a little more than Victoria. She lingered while handing me one, like she was getting a sense of me without the costume, and I might have been more uncomfortable if I hadn't gotten the impression that it was just how she was. The two of them settled atop an old curved conveyor line and after a moment I joined them.  
  
Between thirsty gulps Victoria asked, “So what brings you by today, if you're not here to get dunked on? Not that you need a reason to hang, just, you looked like you were walking in with purpose.” She held the can to the back of her neck and nodded to my lip. “Does it have something to do with that?”  
  
I sipped my own can, holding it with both hands. The cold aluminum felt even better than the ice bag so I kept it there. “Sort of. I got in a fight with some Empire kids earlier.”  
  
Surprise registered in Victoria's face before something came to her. “Oh. Winslow, right?”  
  
I nodded.  
  
“Sorry. I haven't been, but I've heard things.”  
  
I waved her off. I liked to think I looked convincing about it. “Anyways, I was going to come by and see if you guys wanted to take down some Nazi capes with me, but I had a talk with someone, and I think I want to do something else.”  
  
“Like what?” Rachel grunted, snapping her fingers at the retriever trying to get onto the conveyor with us.  
  
I let the can lower to my lap. “Hit something the capes aren't a part of. Go at the roots of the rest of their operations. Wherever they keep their guns, or the biggest stash house we can find. Shake their confidence.”  
  
Rachel went quiet, contemplative, though in a way that wasn't out of place on her hardy features. She then turned to Victoria, and though it didn't come through in her expression, I could see the question in her eyes.  
  
Victoria had a growing grin on her face. “Funny you should ask.”


	11. 2.4 Strike

Standing at the heart of Brockton Bay’s southmost wedge, you'd think you'd somehow wandered all the way down to the New York countryside when you were actually only a few miles south of downtown. Hills on the cusp of mountainhood rolled, rose, and dipped, and were it not for the thick weave of needles and leaves it'd boast the best view of the city this side of Captain’s Hill. As it was, autumn's early advances were beginning to take their toll on the hemlocks and white pines, turning the foliage a pale yellow-green and scattering the first casualties atop the grass.  
  
The detritus might have compromised our approach, were we not gliding a foot off the ground. Vega was careful not to brush us up against any stray branches either, and I was curled up tight in her arms to help with that. She'd managed to convince me to repeat the princess carry. My bare feet dribbled oil as we hovered on, boots left behind in a clearing with Bitch.  
  
Now that I'd gotten a good look at the muscle mass Vega was packing beneath all that power, being carried by her was a much more contemplative and blushy experience. I thought I could feel where her power's strength ended and where hers began. It might have just been my imagination, but the notion was enough to fluster me. I wasn't even sure why; I wasn't the type to want to build muscle myself, so it couldn't be the usual jealousy. Perhaps it was more what the strength in her arms represented, two beefy badges of defiance against those that would frown at a woman working out so much.  
  
That was probably it.  
  
“Almost there,” she whispered. “You sure you're down to try this? Stealth stuff usually has the biggest chance to backfire.”  
  
I swallowed my nerves. There'd be time to appreciate her willpower later. “I'll be fine. The worst anyone without powers can do to me is mess up my costume.”  
  
Though I couldn't see it for her mask, I could hear the frown in her voice. “Just making sure you know what you're getting into,” she muttered. “Remember to- oh, _shh_ , there it is.”  
  
I twisted in her arms to see bits of blue-grey through the trees. As she carefully drifted closer the rest of our target came into view.  
  
In the middle of a sizeable clearing stood a large house the color of the sky at dusk. It was either a product of a Victorian revival style or an actual historical building kept well-maintained, with all sorts of angular bits jutting up and out from the primary shapes. One corner, starting from the front and coming around to the side, was shaped like an octagonal carousel, featuring large windows with light leaking through closed curtains and a wide porch that wrapped around it.  
  
On the porch there were a number of simple wooden chairs and in one sat a man with a shaved head, a thick beard, a white tee, and true blue jeans, ostensibly out for a smoke. With the way he watched the long drive up to the house, how he scanned the treeline ahead of us, I would've been surprised if he didn't have a handgun tucked into the back of those jeans.  
  
The second story didn't have any lights on.  
  
We'd been approaching the side of the house where the porch ended, but now Vega changed course and rounded the treeline towards the back of the house. When we were well out of view of the lookout she began to approach, passing by a swingset marred more by disuse than disrepair. There was no regular back entrance but a shed attachment seemed to serve the same purpose, set a little lower to the ground. A newer addition, probably. She dropped me off in front of its solid-looking door and gave me a tilt of the head.  
  
“I know,” I whispered, barely more than a breath. “Yell if I need you, yell really loud if I need Rachel too.”  
  
She nodded and floated up and past the second story overhang, hidden by the slope of the roof from any angle but the treeline it faced.  
  
Even if she couldn't see me it was weird to do this with her around, but I shoved the discomfort aside and crouched down low. As slow as I could, to minimize sound, I let my body melt, oozing out of my costume and puddling onto the small strip of stone patio in front of the door. From there I had to follow my sense of touch to seep through the thin gap between door and floor. There'd been a chance that they'd have a hard rubber sealer at the threshold to keep rainwater and bugs out but I hit no such hindrance on my way in. I managed without much trouble, if a good helping of discomfort instead.  
  
Once inside I worked to pull myself together into a semi-solid state, cohesive enough to have hair, a face, and a shape resembling my body but (quite thankfully) lacking any detail beyond a torso and limbs. Every inch of my body save for my eyes dribbled oil and it pooled on the concrete beneath me. This made pushing some into the hinges and lock easy but also made turning the lock and knob frustratingly hard.  
  
Once I'd finally managed it, I opened the door, nabbed my costume, sans boots, and closed it again, leaving it unlocked. I settled back into costume and took my first real look around.  
  
Vega had been watching this place, among others, for weeks. There was only one stash the Empire bothered to rotate between houses, and it would be here tonight. She'd even kept track of the guard details, which was why we knew to expect five to seven members, and that unless one was only posing as mundane, there wouldn't be any on-deck cape backup.  
  
Problem was, for all she could gather watching from a distance, there was no way for her to know where exactly they hid the stash once inside. I was on my own there.  
  
The shed was well stocked and well kept. An expensive-looking mower sat close to the door next to a few gas cans and two stands for a weed-whacker and leaf blower. A pair of storage cabinets filled up with both individual toolboxes and transparent built-in drawers of odds and ends took up a wall to themselves. The door into the home proper was right across from me, with a couple small steps making up for the elevation disparity.  
  
What drew my attention was the workbench at the far end to both doors. It was a solid, blocky thing, gunmetal black, with numerous drawers where I'd assumed there should have been leg room. Then again, there was no chair in here, so maybe not. Atop it was a rack, built-in like a bed’s headboard, from which hung all sizes of wrench and hammer and such. It was notably thick, much more so than it would need to be to hold up those tools, but again, my knowledge of such things was limited at best.  
  
On the way I checked the rest of the room for any sort of cache, working by the moonlight flooding through the window, but found nothing out of place in the toolboxes or drawers. I even checked the mower bag in the name of thoroughness, but to no avail.  
  
The benchtop itself had nothing on it so I knelt down and got to scouring the drawers. They opened smoothly even without my oil. The cubby-shaped drawers held power tools organized with ease of access in mind. The tray-shaped ones contained accessories, like cords and drill bits. I held my breath opening the lowest ones, taller than the cubbies and wider than the trays, but found only the power tools and accessories that wouldn't fit in the other drawers.  
  
I frowned, wondering if my intuition had led me astray. The bench certainly stood out, looking more like a custom job than the high-end Lowe's items populating the rest of the shed. It could have just been a vanity project, and it probably was to some degree, but I'd been expecting… something. Something different. Something, well, unexpected.  
  
A light went on in my head. My hands traced the sides and corners of the bench, scouring each square inch for anomalies. The main body of the thing yielded no surprises. _But what about…_  
  
There. Halfway up the rack’s right side, shallow enough to miss if you weren't looking for it: a small sliding switch. I nudged it down and something in the headboard unlatched. A tentative tug revealed I could now pull the face, rack, wrenches and all, away from the body of the headboard. At first it would only give in one direction, out towards me, but that direction soon curved upwards and then back towards the wall. Once it was settled above where it'd been before, the system of slim metal arms and joints supporting it clicked into place, holding it up even when I let go.  
  
_Bingo_.  
  
Guns. Lots of guns. Nearly every hook and rung held cold metal death. Pistols, revolvers, semi-autos, assault rifles, all tightly packed on a rack that'd been hidden in the hollow of the headboard.  
  
There was even an assortment of knives along the bottom rung, some sheathed, some folded, and a few less-than-legal switchblades. A white cleaning cloth covered in mostly-faded stains hung from a hook.  
  
Somehow I felt sicker looking at the cloth than I did the weapons. Almost all of the washed out stains had a tinge of ruddy brown to them. My jaw clenched so hard it felt like my teeth were going to shatter. _Who did those belong to_ , I wondered. _Whose blood are they wiping off of their knives? How close did the ones I care about come to being reduced to a bleached stain?_  
  
_How many of these people were like me?_  
  
In a tremendous feat of self control, I did _not_ burst into the house and dole out long-overdue revenge to the Nazis. Instead I took the cloth and clenched it hard in my fist, promised myself I'd do something later for the lives I held, something symbolic. The cloth settled into the pocket of my coveralls.  
  
I opened the door to the yard a bit wider this time. A soft _click, click_ with my tongue against the roof of my mouth summoned Vega from her hiding spot and she followed me into the shed. She responded to the weapons cache with a satisfied thumbs-up, then began the process of carrying out as many guns as she could carry at a time without making noise. I kept watch from the shed’s threshold. The guns would disappear with her into the forest and she would come back empty-handed to take more away. In all it took five, maybe ten minutes. It was hard to keep track of time with tensions running so high.  
  
When she'd taken the last of them she returned, looked around the shed, and grabbed the grass bag off the mower. She turned to me, pointed to the door to the yard, then to the door to the house, and gave me an inquisitive tilt of the head.  
  
I pointed to the door to the house. No hesitation.  
  
After a moment, she nodded and floated out and into the trees.  
  
When she was gone I closed the door again. No need to alert any wayward Nazi wandering through the backyard. I climbed the small steps in front of the other door, leaned in and pressed my ear to the smooth wood.  
  
“ _...then… grabbed the rail… slipped… right on his ass!_ ”  
  
“ _...ahaha!_ ”  
  
“ _...ha ha, oh hell… tell you… the time… niece… fork in the microwave?_ ”  
  
Chatter, and if I had to guess, coming from whatever room was at the center of that carousel shape, a living room probably. It was far enough that I couldn't make out every word, and I didn't hear any movement towards me or otherwise. I eased the knob, nudged it open, and slipped into the house.  
  
The adjoining laundry room was as tidy as the shed, all detergents and stain removers neatly ordered on a shelf under a wall cabinet. A washer-dryer combo that couldn't have been more than five years old took up most of the space. The other end of the room opened up into a kitchen area that, to my relief, didn't seem to be directly connected to the carousel-shaped room.  
  
The cabinet was a bust, filled only with old shoe boxes, general cleaning supplies, and the like. The washer and dryer were empty of both cash and clothes. I even tried to peek through the vent in the corner but found nothing out of the ordinary.  
  
The chatter became clearer as I snuck into the kitchen, and I started to wonder if I wasn't pushing my luck, but the slight, sobering weight in my pocket erased all doubts.  
  
The kitchen was even nicer than the Barnes’, a home improvement magazine's wet dream boasting smooth stone countertops, an unnecessary amount of pots and pans, and a sink you could bathe a middle schooler in. A kitchen island broke up the otherwise open space, and atop it sat a sizable plastic cooler, the kind you'd see on sale at a department store. It was the only thing that looked out of place.  
  
“...made sure she learned her lesson. Kid never went near the thing again.”  
  
“Well, s’long as you're around, you mean.”  
  
“Hey, don't underestimate what a good spankin’ll do. Now she won't look at me with anything less’n respect in’er eyes, and she ain't even my kid. Won't listen to her damn mother but she'll listen to me, alright.”  
  
I tried the cooler first and found it full of beer nestled in somewhat melted ice. Of course it wouldn't be that easy.  
  
“Anyways. How ‘bout you, Skinny? What's new with you, you get that extra spendin’ money you were ‘specting?”  
  
Something between a growl and a groan. “Fucking ‘course I didn't. World hates an honest, hard-working man, won't see him get nothing. Supervisor threw a bitch-fit the other day, talking ‘bout ‘no bonuses if we don't meet production estimates’. Like it's our fault the company's gone to shit and won't fix the equipment.”  
  
Nothing in the upper cupboards but plates, bowls, and, well, cups. An absurd sort of curiosity had me checking in the lidded pans, but, as I should have expected, no dice.  
  
“Better cross your fucking fingers it don't shut down anytime soon. I still can't get work anywhere. If it weren't for jobs like this I'd be dumpster-diving with the apes on thirty-second street.”  
  
Someone patting something. “Like looks out for like, brother. You've always got friends here.”  
  
“You know why it is you can't find a gig, right?”  
  
“No, but I get the feeling you're about to tell me.”  
  
“You haven't been tuning in to Bailey lately, have you? Look, it's ‘cause now that the ports’re getting big again, got shipments starting to come an’ go, we've got these Arabs and, and Argentinians or whatever, and they're sneaking in on the ships and taking the work that should be ours. Undermining our place in the market, and shit- and then the unions go and side with them. Snakes in the fucking grass, all of ‘em.”  
  
There. In the space under the sink, behind the rat killer and the roach motels, a big black duffel bag, bulging with what could only be bills. A quick, quiet _unzip-zip_ confirmed it. I carefully moved the boxes of pest control out of the way and slung the bag over my shoulder.  
  
That was the guns and the cash taken care of. I could leave now with what I had, disappear into the night and leave them to find out they'd been had. I liked the idea of making them stew in their impotence and frustration, but… it felt somehow inadequate. Weapons and money, that would hurt, but it was impersonal. An blow to them as a gang, but not to them as _Nazis_.  
  
There were two paths out of the kitchen, not counting the way I'd come in. One led into a mahogany-paneled dining room which, by how I could hear the talk coming from that way, must have led to the living room. The other was a hallway with a straight shot to the front door and a staircase alongside it.  
  
The lights on the second story had been off.  
  
I thought of the cloth in my pocket. I thought of Anne getting harassed at some bar, of Charlotte trembling in the stairwell. I thought of the constant unease I felt whenever I went outside, walking through a city half-ruled by _literal Nazis_. That omnipresent feeling that they'd just _know_ there was something different about me, that they were moments away from doing something _about_ it, and the tremendous toll that constant anxiety took on my nerves.  
  
Driven by half-formed ideas like _steal something precious_ and _trash something personal_ I headed down the hallway.  
  
Sneaking around in bare feet meant my footfalls were softer, so I wasn't too worried about making noise. The real trouble was the gap in the wall near the end, opposite the staircase’s entrance, that also connected to the living room. I knelt down low and peeked around the corner.  
  
“I'm getting another beer, who else wants more?”  
  
“Nab me one too, will ya Skinny?”  
  
“Me too.”  
  
From that angle, I could see the back of a fine leather couch, past which I expected a coffee table and some other seating to match. On one side were a bunch of big bay windows looking out into the night, and on the other there was a huge wall-mounted TV before the entrance to the dining room. A hulking lump, equal parts muscle and fat wrapped in a workman's jacket, lumbered through said entrance and out of sight. Two pale heads peeked above the back of the couch, one balding and the other shaved. Neither was turned towards me.  
  
I made my way to the stairs, as fast as I could go without giving myself away.  
  
When I was maybe two-thirds of the way up, just out of sight from the first floor, barely able to see past the landing, the upstairs hall light switched on.  
  
I halted, stock-still, and held my breath.  
  
There was a man there, maybe forty or so, wearing flannel pajamas in a solid midnight blue. He trudged from one room to another, the bathroom probably, his movements sticky with sleep and his slippers dragging against the polished wood floor. He hadn't seemed to notice me at all.  
  
“Ah, fuck,” someone called from the kitchen. “Whichever one of you tracked shit into the kitchen, you better clean it up before Peterson sees.”  
  
He craned his neck towards the stairs, a scowl already forming on his face, and saw me.  
  
For a second, neither of us moved.  
  
Then his eyes went wide and he backtracked to the room he came from, almost stumbling, muttering, “...fuck, oh _fuck_ -”  
  
Thanking my lucky stars he hadn't called the cavalry yet, I quickened my pace up the stairs, still trying to keep my footfalls light, hoping to delay an all-out Nazi dogpile as long as I could. At the same time my mind was racing, trying to come up with ways to deal with this Peterson guy. There had to be something up there I could bind and gag him with, or a well-worded threat to keep him docile-  
  
That all went out the window when, just as I got a step away from the landing, he re-emerged toting a shotgun.  
  
_Clkk-clkk_  
  
I had just enough time to draw a quick, shallow breath. This wasn't going to be fun.  
  
**_BOOM_**  
  
The shot tore through my costume, then through my gut, turning me into a chaotic splatter of oil. Some of me splashed against the walls and some of me soaked my coveralls and the duffel bag, but most of me spilled down the stairs, the sensation overwhelming and disorienting, especially without sight.  
  
When most of me had pooled at what I had to assume was the bottom of the stairs I rushed to congeal into the same half-solid form I'd taken in the garage. Once I had everything from the waist up risen from the puddle of me, I scrambled with viscous hands to grab my goggles and put them on.  
  
The first thing I saw was Skinny, the one who'd gone to get beers, standing in the downstairs hallway, looking up from the dribbled trail of oil and staring at me. Once he processed the bizarre sight of my current state, he opened his mouth and yelled.  
  
“ _Cape!_ ”


	12. 2.5 Strike

As though cued, the back door slammed open and Vega rocketed into the house. She blurred down the hallway, collided into Skinny from behind, and took him with her as she passed me. Her exit made it clear she considered the front door’s knob and locks to be frivolous formalities. The crack of wood splintering was like lightning striking.  
  
I rose further from the puddle of me, struggled to push myself up with my sopping arms and form legs beneath my torso, but a pair of loud bangs sounded and one leg burst in a spray of oil. The loss of support sent me sinking back down, tilted and disoriented.  
  
My pseudo-solid ears were ringing but with my body in this middle state, absorbing vibrations, I could piece together the words I didn't hear right.  
  
“Hey, _hey!_ Right in my ear!”  
  
The two guys that'd been sitting on the couch were using it as cover now, one pointing a handgun at me and the other pressing his hands to his ears.  
  
“Huh?” said the latter. “No, I can shoot in here, it's self-defense.”  
  
“What?”  
  
Handgun guy's eyes flickered to his deafened buddy for a split second.  
  
I used the opportunity to surge up and out of the ground on my remaining leg, forming the other just as I made the next stride forward. By the time he reacted I was already vaulting over the back of the couch. A shot sprayed my midsection out behind me, the sound rippled through me, and my fist clipped his jaw. Then the rest of me collided against him, knocking him to the floor, soaked through.  
  
I pooled next to him and tried to reform, but before I was bicep height out of my oil the other guy I'd seen kicked through a shoulder, dispersing it. A third guy who must have been out of my line of sight did the same to my head from behind.  
  
For a split second I could feel every part of his boot as his kick followed through, even as it forced past where my skull should have been. My head exploding like one of Gallagher’s watermelons was only the second most unpleasant part.  
  
Now I was sprayed liberally over the hardwood, covering almost half the floor of the carousel-shaped room. I could feel through the oil I was connected to, knew where each mook was without having to remake my eyes and see.  
  
Inspiration struck and I eschewed the full reforming process, instead creating a lone, liquid hand by the foot of one of the two standing up. The other shouted- I could feel it -but it was too late. I gripped him by the ankle, shifted my arm out along the pool of oil, and dragged his leg along with it. Between my pulling and him slipping on the me-slickened ground he was suddenly helpless, falling flat on his face.  
  
I felt another yell I couldn't hear and my arm burst into liquid. I tried to form another by the third guy's foot but that one got destroyed too. As I kept trying and failing I noticed neither of his feet were leaving the ground, and whatever he was hitting me with didn't feel like a fist. He had a weapon of some kind, one he was using to play whack-a-mole with the arms I made.  
  
Fed up, I decided to try something different. I held off on the arms for a moment, instead subtly drawing oil towards a spot behind him, thickening there, collecting without forming. The more I brought together the more I felt like a compressed spring, the pressure building as my density increased.  
  
When I was as sure as I could be that he wasn't looking my way, I released all the pressure in one direction and geysered up and forward out of the ground. Momentum carried me into his back as I finished forming and I tackled him to the ground. We skidded a bit, like a rider and sled, before coming to a stop right in front of the bay windows. He had a grey length in one hand, a metal bat, probably, and the other scrabbled for leverage. It was hard to tell much else without my goggles.  
  
Before I could think about it I gripped him by the blur of brown I assumed was his hair and slammed his head against the wet hardwood with a thunk and a splash. He swore hoarsely, the pain distracting him from his struggling. I almost felt bad for a second, but then he snarled out some vicious, aimless slurs that made my liquid guts boil with fury, and I remembered who I was fighting. I shoved his face to the floor again with another thunk and he cried out.  
  
With any luck I'd cracked a tooth.  
  
I got to my feet and checked on the other two. The guy I'd dragged kept slipping on my oil and was now liberally coated; a kick to the gut counted him out for the moment. The other guy, the one I'd first downed, was almost up to a kneeling position. I rectified that by driving my knee into his back.  
  
I'd just found and donned my goggles when Vega flew back in through what was left of the front door, this time launching the bald guy that'd been smoking on the porch down into the hallway. She stopped between the couch and the stairwell and turned to me.  
  
“Lookout called for backup,” she said, no-nonsense. “Grab the cash and let's get-”  
  
A now-familiar boom interrupted her, and whatever buckshot didn't hit her in the back dug into the furniture and pockmarked the floor. She flew towards me and ducked behind the couch, and wasn't it odd that the Brute who could tank gunshots was taking cover?  
  
Peterson stood near the top of the stairs, clearly surprised Vega hadn't just crumpled to the ground. He gave an undignified squawk and scrambled back upstairs.  
  
Seconds later, Vega followed.  
  
I stood there a moment, not sure what to do in the reprieve, before remembering the money. I dashed to the base of the stairs.  
  
My costume, sans goggles, was in tatters. The middle of the coveralls was so torn up it'd almost been turned into two separate parts. A pair of pants and a crop top. It might have been funny but I was too disappointed to care. I'd worked pretty hard putting that together. It hadn't even survived my second outing.  
  
I took the cleaning cloth from its pocket and left the rest.  
  
The duffel bag, conversely, was pretty much fine. I stuffed the cloth in with the cash, picked it up and headed for the door. Vega was experienced, smart, and powerful. She could take one regular guy with a shotgun on her own. She might even see it as insulting if I lent a hand, like I was insulting her abilities. She didn't necessarily seem the type but I wasn't eager to test that.  
  
“Hey.”  
  
I turned to see the bald man propping himself up in the hallway. Blood was dribbling from his nose and staining strips of his beard dark. He met my gaze with a sneering grin.  
  
“Eat shit.”  
  
I only noticed the open Zippo lighter in his hand as he tossed it. It landed in the oil by my feet and I had just enough time to jolt backwards and out the door before it ignited.  
  
When I was a few yards down the walkway towards the driveway, where I saw Skinny slumped over the hood of a dented SUV, I turned to take in the scene behind me. The uneven splatters of my footsteps coming out of the house were disconnected enough the fire wasn't spreading towards me. From the looks of the rising flames I could see through the doorway, though, I doubted the same could be said of the oil in the living room.  
  
Panicked shouts confirmed my suspicions. One of the grunts inside took the bat to one of the bay windows, cleared out the glass left at the edges, then half-helped, half-dragged the other two out and onto the porch, one after the other. He looked down to find the end of his oil-darkened sleeve had caught fire and dove over the railing to roll on the grass. His cursing was even less creative than the other guy’s.  
  
I shouted over him. My voice gurgled, just a bit. “Vega!”  
  
Seconds later one of the second story windows shattered outwards and she leaned out of it. She was holding Peterson’s shotgun and contorting the barrel the way one might fidget with a bendy pencil.  
  
“Cool,” she said, taking in my liquid-ish state. She shook her head a little. “Yeah?”  
  
I pointed to the living room. The furniture and drapes were doing decent impressions of firewood and tinder. “Evacuate?”  
  
She leaned further out the window to get a better look, and were it not for her flight she'd have tumbled right out of it. “Whoa, yeah, okay.” She tossed the mangled knot that had once been a shotgun down into the bushes that lined the house before disappearing back into the room.  
  
I was almost reluctant to bail these assholes out of a fire, especially one they'd started, but risking manslaughter charges sounded like a phenomenally bad idea. The fire itself… I couldn't bring myself to mind. If anything, I felt like I'd gotten the sort of result I'd wanted, when I'd decided to try the stairs. As I waited for Vega to finish up, I kept an eye on the spreading fire and the injured Nazis, and wondered why I still felt like I hadn't done enough.  
  
Then, suddenly, the back of my head began to _scream_ with heat; my hair was burning, and since it was oil right now, I could _feel it_. On instinct I darted forward and cast off the outermost layer of my oil, like running out of my own skin, leaving the scalding part behind. I pivoted on a heel to face my attacker and drop into a stance.  
  
Skinny stood before me, battered but clearly not downed. His meathead mug was bruised and bleeding in places, skin torn more than cut. Flecks of paint matching the color of the SUV in the driveway were embedded into his workman's jacket. His posture subtly favored one leg over the other, tilted just enough to put most of his weight on it. Despite the state of the rest of him, though, his gaze was unyielding. His grip on the blowtorch in his hand, the kind one might use to sear meat or start a campfire, was firm and sure.  
  
The trunk of the SUV stood open. Apparently I'd been so distracted I'd not heard it.  
  
The oil I'd shed lay in a burning puddle on the concrete between us. The light of the flame brought out its pearlescent qualities, made the colors dance wickedly.  
  
I dropped the duffel onto the trim lawn the walkway cut through and scowled. I wouldn't be able to pull the same tricks I'd used on the others here. Puddling meant dropping my goggles, and even a temporary half-blindness was too risky here. Plus, it left behind too much oil, and covering the ground with flammable material against a man with the means to set it off could become a death sentence for an equally flammable me.  
  
Skinny dashed towards me, stepping over the small patch of fire and crossing the gap faster than I'd expected a man of his size to be able to. He set the blowtorch burning again and made to jam it into my gut, under my guard.  
  
I pushed it away, but couldn't avoid it entirely. Flame flared to life on my hand. I didn't exactly have pain receptors like this but the heat itself was almost unbearable. I wanted so badly to throw it back into his face- I waved it at him like I was going to, staving off his next attack -but I'd be risking giving him more dire burns than I should. My hesitation gave the fire the opportunity to spread to my forearm. I flung the whole thing off onto the lawn, away from the duffel bag.  
  
With the way my power was overflowing, I reformed the arm almost immediately.  
  
He charged again, intent on giving me little room to think. I threw oil at his feet to get him to slip, but in the heat of the moment my aim was off and I only managed to splash the bottoms of his pants legs. He swung the torch in arcs this time, swiping, aiming to catch my arms again.  
  
I was forced to back off, just barely avoiding each assault. I tried to veer into the lawn but he cut me off, positioning so I had nowhere to go but back up the walkway.  
  
And then the back of my heel hit the first porch step and I fell backwards. I caught myself right before impact, one hand gripping the porch railing’s support and the other on the corner of the top step. I could feel the heat of the growing house fire behind me, could picture it spreading out the door, creeping towards me.  
  
Skinny stopped and stood over me, blowtorch lit and pointed at my chest. His breath was short but there was an upward tilt to his open mouth. Predatory. Gratified.  
  
“Got real-ass superpowers-” he licked his lips. “-and all you are for it is colorful an’ flammable.” He laughed, an ugly thing. “What's it like, being that pathetic?”  
  
I was panicking just as much as I was fuming, but I didn't give him the satisfaction of a response. Instead I searched frantically for a viable way out, but most of my options seemed downright suicidal. I found myself wishing I'd flung that fire at him before, consequences be damned.  
  
And then it struck me that, if our positions were reversed, he would never have hesitated to do the same to me. None of these guys would have. Even now, in this dire them-or-me situation, I was still holding back where they never would. I was avoiding injuring or scarring him, and he was eagerly threatening my _life_.  
  
“If I light you up right now, and you burned up all the way,” he mused, tilting his head, “would you even leave a body? I'm real curious.” He began to lean in, inching the torch closer and closer, muttering almost to himself. “Kinda hope you're a fag or something too, just for the irony.”  
  
Like a frayed rope straining to hold up a boulder, my compunctions _snapped_.  
  
The hand I'd had on the porch shot up to grab the torch by the nozzle. It caught right away. He struggled against me to keep it in position, but when the fire spread down my arm he let go and pulled back, holding his hand in the other, hissing through his teeth. He tried to back away.  
  
I used my grip on the railing support to pull myself forward and followed the momentum through with a blazing haymaker to his cheek.  
  
He shouted, “ _Fuck!_ ” and staggered back. Streaks of burning oil marked his face and he started smacking at the spots to put them out. “Mother _fucker!_ ”  
  
The fire was almost at my shoulder now. I flung the whole arm at his oil-soaked pant legs.  
  
They went up and his words abandoned him. With haste befitting a burning man he took off his jacket and whipped it at his ankles, smothering the flames on his injured leg before tending to the other.  
  
His inarticulate yelps punctuated my vindication, but my gut demanded more. I broke into a sprint and rammed my shoulder into his chest.  
  
He tipped and fell on his back onto the same flaming puddle he'd lit up at the start. With it soaking his shirt he had to roll onto the grass to extinguish himself before it got out of hand. He then simply collapsed, panting.  
  
A pair of thuds sounded nearby and I whipped around, adrenaline pumping, but it was only Vega, dropping a ziptied lookout and an unconscious Peterson next to each other on the lawn. The portion of it that wasn't burning, at least.  
  
“Sorry,” she said, nodding towards Skinny. “Thought he was down for the count, or at least down enough to leave for later.”  
  
I shook my head and kept my voice mostly steady. “Not a problem.”  
  
“You good to go? We don't have much time before their backup gets here.”  
  
I picked up the duffel, then looked back at Skinny, saw his charred clothes and the swollen, angry red burns on his face. It was a lot more than I'd done to the rest of these guys, and much more intentional than the house fire.  
  
It still wasn't enough.  
  
I swallowed the discontent. “Yeah. Let's go.”  
  
She lifted her mask just enough to uncover her mouth, stuck her finger and thumb in the corners of her lips, and loosed a piercing whistle. It had a short rising cadence to it that I doubted was accidental.  
  
A cacophony of snapping branches and crushed shrubbery heralded Bitch’s arrival from beyond the treeline. She was riding one monstrous lizard-dog and leading the other. They rounded clear of the burning building and stopped in front of us.  
  
Vega frowned before lowering her mask. “Are you good to ride like that?”  
  
“I'll have to be,” I said, climbing up what was either Judas or Brutus. Whichever one Bitch wasn't riding. I could grab the spines just fine but I struggled some finding good footholds. Settled astride the beast, duffel in my lap, I jerked a thumb towards the house. “My costume’s in there.”  
  
The fire was reaching the second story, now.  
  
Guileless, Bitch furrowed her brow and asked, “Should I leave mine behind too?”  
  
“What? No,” said Vega. “Why would you?”  
  
If she was joking, she kept her face amazingly straight. “Nudity is aerodynamic.”  
  
If I'd had skin on my cheeks I would have blushed hard enough to ignite my oil. I hadn't been thinking about it like I was naked but it was true, wasn't it? I shrunk in on myself, embarrassed and a little humiliated.  
  
_How did I not realize that?_  
  
Vega sighed. “Just go. When we hit the street it's two blocks to the main road into Brockton proper, then we skirt the same zones as usual. Watch for five-oh, foamers and capes. First priority is getaway.” With that she flew on ahead.  
  
Bitch gave a whistle of her own and her dogs broke into breakneck sprints, mine following hers. They knocked the SUV and Lexus in the driveway out of our path, like kicking cans on the sidewalk. The turn onto the road proper was sharp, though their claws left scars in the pavement. We started for the thoroughfare, just behind Vega.  
  
We were nearly at the intersection when I spotted something odd. There wasn't much of it but there was just enough to notice if you squinted at it, and in this weather, at this elevation, the notion was almost absurd. I wondered aloud, though my voice was all but lost on the wind.  
  
“Is that… fog?”


End file.
